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SECULARISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN THE WEST: THE MATERIAL AND THE ETHEREAL A. R. Blackshield I. THE CONCEPT OF SECULARISM The Indian Law Institute's seminar on secularism, of which this volume is a record, heard many pleas-beginning with the stirring opening statement of Chief Justice Gajendragadkar-for an approach to the problem of secularism which would not be merely "ethereal," but would point to concrete practical measures for the implementation of the constitutional attitudes relating to religion, and of the positive secular ideology which those attitudes embody. The problem which seemed to bedevil every paper, and every hour of discussion, was that secularism is a protean concept, defying all efforts to pin it down in precise, concrete propositions. This pervasive elusiveness of subject-matter means that precise, concrete directives for action are also impossible; we are in an area in which all our ideas must be . inherently "ethereal." We might try to escape onto firmer ground by saying that at any rate secularism is a movement away from religion, with the result that by saying what religion is, we can at least say, what secularism is not. But, of course, this does not really help us. Even if we assume that this kind of argument by opposites is helpful,' "secularism" is not exactly the opposite of religion; and in any case we soon discover that we cannot say what religion is, either. The forms of religion, and the primal motivations which it embodies, have a diversity which in conceptual terms is almost unmanageable. Indians and Indologists are fond of insisting that "it is impossible to define Hinduism because there are no beliefs or institutions which are common tv all Hindus.'?' but the point is equally apt, and equally baffling, when we try to define "religion" in general. The concepts and categories accepted in popular and even sociological usage turn out on closer examination to be vague, unfocussed, inconsistent and sometimes quite unsubstantial; and the social phenomena we want to examine by applying these amorphous notions turn out to be equally amorphous. We discover, too, that on a subject so fraught with ideological and emotive overtones, objective discussion is almost impossible. Some of us 1. On the doubts here arising see A. R. Blackshield, "The Game They Dare Not Bite" (1963) 3 Jaipur LJ. 44 at 45, esp. n. I. 2. M. N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India (1962) 149. 10 Secularism and Social Control believe that in all things religion is man's one true way to salvation, to righteousness, and even to manhood. Others "count religion but a childish toy,"3 if not a wicked fraud. Yet others may hold either of these views as to some areas only of religious activity, or may even hold both views at once as to aifferent activit ies. And whatever our position, we will tend to hold to it with peculiar intensity. Perhaps, indeed, this intensity of belief e is a feature that we can safely predicate of religiousness in general;' but we must then extend "religiousness" to include anti-religiousness as well. One striking aspect of the essays here collected is to see how all the writers have found themselves struggling with the same confusions and cognitive waylessness. Nor are we alone in this. Howard Becker has told us of his years of personal struggle for a satisfying concept of the secular;" and even as the Indian Law Institute seminar was being organized, Mr. David Martin, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, published a challenging essay 'Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularization."! In it he argued that we should frankly admit that the various distinctions from time to ti me offered between the "religious" and the "secular" are all of them inadequate, inaccurate and inoperable; and that there is no way of sorting through their variety to any clear and operable definition either of "secularism" or of "religion." Consequently he argued that there exists no process in social and cultural development which can meaningfully be called "secularization."? For this would have to refer to a process to which all religious institutions may alike be liable-involving commonly-shared deterioration, through commonly-shared causes, of commonly-shared characteristics. And since religious phenomena have no commonly-snared characteristics, "secularization" can only be a proselytizing slogan invented by ideologists (for instance of Marxism) as a weapon in the campaign to hasten the decline of religion." 3. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, 1.14. And cf, with the general tenor of the above paragraph R. Carrington, A Million Years of Man (1963) 280-81; B. Malinowski, Foundations of Faith 'and Morals (1936).1. 4. See H. Becker, "Current Sacred-Secular, Theory and its Development," in H. Becker and A. Boskoff (eds.), Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change (1957) 133.at 142ff., discussed infra at nn. 80-85. 5. See id. li8ff. 6. Published in J. Gould (ed.), Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences 1965 (1965) 169-182. 7. ld. 170-175. 8. See id. 176 : The whole concept appears as a tool of counter-religious ideologies which identify the "real" element in religion for polemical purposes and then arbitrarily relate it to the notion of a unitary and irreversible process, partie' for the aesthetic satisfactions found in such notions and partly as a psychological boost to the movements with which they are associated. And E. E. Aubrey, Secularism a Myth (1954). ct. A. R. Blackshield 11 Yet clearly enough Martin is himself here ideologizing. Many of his difficulties arise not from the factors so far discussed, but from his determination to see "secularization" a~ a process that happens to religious institut.ons thefnselves. The truth is that if we ask ourselves what is secularized, this obviously cannot be religion itself. The intuitive clue already mentioned-that secularism is in some sense a movement away from religionmay not lead us into clarity. But, at least with regard to "secularism" in Western language. cultures, it is the one firm lifeline that a scholar can cling to when he ventures into the tossing conceptual seas of "secularism." So long as we do cling to it, we have to add that obviously, religion cannot move away from itself. Nor does secularism as commonly understood in Western cultures involve the counter-religiousness on which Martin lays so much stress. The secular movement away from religion need by no means be a total abandonment of it. It is perfectly possible to advocate both secularism and religion; and while non-religious, anti-religious, sceptical and profane positions may exemplify "secularism," or offer one kind of basis for it, it would be a fatal a limine error to identify it with these." In discussions of the "secular" provisions of the Indian Constitution from the drafting stage onwards, this last point at least has been repeatedly made clear. When I say that a State should not identify itself with any particular religion, I do not mean to say that a State should be anti-religious or irreligious. We have certainly declared India to be a secular State. But to my mind, a secular State is neither a God-less State nor an irreligious State.tv Yet the very Indian statements which so vehemently insist that secularism is not "non-religious, anti-religious, sceptical and profane," also insist that secularism is a complex cluster of socio-ideological aspirations, thoughtways and attitudes which at first sight seem to amount to much the same thing. In the present volume this approach is given sociological accreditation in the extremely cogent essay of Professor Y.R. Damle." That writer insists that the "structural characteristics" of secularism include rationality and emphasis on cognition; the scientific spirit; individuation and individualism; universalism and freedom from 9. See Becker, cit. supra n. 4, at 142. See also Lord Devlin, The Enforcementof Morals (1965) 3-4; and see the further discussion infra § III. 10. H. V. Karnath , in 7 C.A.D. (1948) 837, quoted by l\!. V. Pylee, Constitutional Government of India (1960) 253. And see the related views collected id. 253·55, esp. of S. Radhakrishnan, Recovery of Faith (1955) 202; and for a more extensive anthology of largely similar quotations see appendix I to V. P. Luthera, The Concept of the Secular State in India (1964) 159.166' .11. See infra, 12 Secularism and Social Control particularistic loyalties; achievement rather than ascription as the basis of social ethics; and even "the rule of law." We might add to the list materialism, humanism, the pursuit 01 economic progress, scientific progress, technology, industrialization, and generally what will later be called a concern with "thing-techniques." We might also add political pluralism, religious tolerance, and religious freedom. Perhaps, however, two ingredients above all stand out. One is the serious and positive pursuit of what Roscoe Pound calls "the social interest in minimum standards of individual life;"12 that is, the attainment of socio-economic justice for all. The other is an easy adaptability; a creative, constructive pragmatism; a lack of emotional resistance to change in social norms.P This comprehensive interpretation of what "secularism" means may here be referred to as the "rol!ed-up materialist" view; and I shall suggest at the end of this essay that, like it or not, we may simply have to accept the fact that this is the Indian concept of secularism. Nevertheless such a concept sounds rather strangely in Western ears. No doubt (as we shall see in section III) all of the attitudes embraced in "rolled-up materialism" are historically connected with the growth of secularism in the West. But it seems merely confusing to say that the merger of all of them is what secularism means. "Secularism" then becomes a mere ideological label summing up everything that we want to see in a strong, vital modern society. Nor does it even seem to do that successfully. , For, on the one hand, our desiderata for modern societies should surely include a deep and abiding faith in ethical values; and it can hardly be suggested that secularism means this. On the other hand, some of the desiderata that rolled-up materialism includes are things that we do want, but only in a qualified way. We want a healthy, realistic materialism; but not a crass, obsessive materialism. We want more and more industrialization; but not a soul-destroying industrialization. We want individualism; but not an anti-social individualism. To lump all our aspirations together in a rolled-up materialist view of secularism seems at first sight to leave us no conceptual lebensraum within which to make such vital distinctions. Furthermore, the very fact that we detect a socio-historical relationship between secularism and "rolled-up materialism" requires us to define the former as something different from the latter. If all the distinc'tive attitude-components of modern Western-type cultures, and all the factors which have eased the emergence of such cultures, are simply to be lumped together finder a single name, we are left with no conceptual 12. See R. Pound, 3 Jurisprudence (1959) 315ff.; J. Stone, Social Dimensions of Law and Justice (1966) 352-57 • 13. See Becker, cit. supra n. 4. at 142ff., discussed inta at nn. 80-85. A. R. Blackshield 13 means for studying their interrelationships. To say that secularism has contributed to (and been fostered by) the rise of individualism may be sociologically, historically, and practically illuminating. So may be similar statement about secularism and materialism, or secularism and readiness to change, or secularism and science. But a similar statement about secularism is either tautologous or nonsensical. "Secularism," in short, must refer to some specific ingredient within modern Western ideologies; and this returns us again to insisting that it means a movement away from religion, and that what we have to do is somehow to make this insistence precise. Of course, the range of areas in which this movement away from religion may occur is as wide as culture itself. But when we first try to think of what secularism means, two areas above all stand out as foci of secularist controversy. One is that of the state and its law; the other is that of education. This seems to suggest that secularism is to be some kind of adjustment amongst law, education and religion; and this in turn suggests a hypothesis on which our exploration of secularism can get under way. Later this hypothesis will need to be modified; but it serves at least to bring into focus the problems we want to discuss. This hypothesis is simple enough. Secularism, it suggests, is not opposed to religion as such; it is opposed rather to the use of religious institutions, and religious motivations, in the legal-political and educative processes. It insists on a functional division of aptitudes-a kind of social separation of powers-t-s-between different kinds of social activity. Reli,gion, education and law should not encroach on each other's territory; ~hould not overreach their own spheres of propriety. So long as religion does keep to its own sphere, secularism is religiously neutral; it neither endorses nor disapproves of religiousness. Secularism, then, is (or is perhaps strictly the advocacy of) that disposition of social affairs in which law and education are independent of religious institutions an ligious motivations. Secularization is an historical development by which t . legal and educative non-dependence on religion tends to be established. In the educative context, secularism is "the attempt to establish an autonomous sphere of knowledge purged of supernatural, fideistic presuppositions;'?" in the legal context, it is the attempt to establish a similarly autonomous sphere of social ordering. The following sections are designed to explore the implications and ramifications of this hypothesis. Section II seeks to 1111 in the sociological background which the hypothesis presupposes (though this background turns out to have its own amorphousness and apori3e). This excursus 14. C/' Sit E. Barker, Principles 0/ Social and Political Theory (1951) 7. 15. B. Groethuysen, "Secularism," in 13 Encyc, Soc. Sc. 631,·at 631. t 14 Secularism and Social Control into matters not immediately relevant vastly compounds the complexities of our approach to secularism; but it seems unavoidable if we are to find our way around in discussing secularism itself. In section III an attempt will be made to identify some of the [(lctors in secularization in the West, and in section IV this will lead to a renewed attack on the conceptual problem. We shall there see (pursuant to the caveat already lodged) that the various sociological factors which our "separation of powers" hypothesis will have served to bring together, finally require us to abandon that hypothesis; and to substitute a more modest and flexible definition of Western "secularism." In this sense .my propositions are like those of Wittgenstein's "ladder," which must be thrown away after our thinking "has climbed out through them, on them, over them. "16 The two final sections will be somewhat less "ethereal." One will pass in rapid review the continuing (though peripheral) problems of secularism in the West. The other- section VI-will seek to open a way into some of the intractable cultural problems of "secularism" in India. II. SOCIOLOGICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF SECULARISM A. Concept of Social Control If "secularism" as a mutually exclusive autonomy of law, education, and religion is to make overall sociological sense, we need a wider frame of reference. In the traditional materials of sociological jurisprudence we find this in the subsumption of all three phenomena-law, religion, education-under the rubric "social control." That term is taken to mean any social process, planned or unplanned by which the regular patterns of behaviour found acceptable in a given culture are created or clarified, enforced or conserved, transmitted or inculcated. A social control may be a body of norms, or an institution, or merely a social "process" or "mechanism" such as imitation or competition; or it may combine all three of these aspects. Yet "social control" as a point of reference is really in no better case than we have seen "religion" to be. The above usage has been well established eversince E.A. Rose wrote his classic work Social Control at the turn of the century." Yet the usage still causes uneasiness.v due to the extremely flexible and shifting use of language which it involves. Probably we carr say, for example, that a paradigmatic "social control" 16. Cf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tract atus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) prop. 6. 54. 17. E. A. Ross, Social Control (1901, reprinted 1908). That work seeks "to determine how far the order we see all about us is due to influences that reach men and women from without, that is, social influences" (id. vii). 18. See recently G. Sawer, Law in Society (1965) 126ff. A. R. Blackshiel d 15 would involve all three of the aspects just mentioned: norms, and institutional arrangements for the creation and implementation of these, and processes and mechanisms for such creation and implementation. Yet when we think of particular social ccntrols we think normaIly of only one of these aspects. Morality, for example, is thought of primarily as a body of norms, with little awareness of the institutions or processes associated with their emergence.. The family, seen as an institution for social control, is thought of only as an institution, and economic competition as a social control is thought of as a kind of pure "process," independent of the institutions by which it is fostered and of the norms which it throws up. Only perhaps when we think of "law" itself are we consciously advertent to all three aspects; and even then the aspect presenting "law" as a body of norms tends to be primary. Moreover, this assimilation under a single term of referents which we subjectively think of as quite different kinds of phenomena (even when we recognize that they are in fact interdependent) is only one way in which the present usage of "social control" strains ordinary language assumptions. We are here required to apply the word "control" to every kind of influence playing a part in the emergence of regular behaviour patterns, whether planned or unplanned, strong or weak, direct or indirect; and whether attributable to the causative action of identifiable persons, or merely to blind "social forces." And insofar as we think of the end product of "social control" in terms of norms, we are required to give the term "norms" a similar wide and flexible meaning, covering not only expressly formulated rule prescriptions, but also vague and indeterminate ideal standards, and mere de facto regularities of behaviour which are "norms" only in the statistical sense. In view of these difficulties it seems necessary at the outset to attempt to clarify what is meant by "social control." For present purposes this can be done by listing twenty-four questions which may meaningfully be asked in relation to any social datum (that is, any body of norms, institution, or social "mechanism") which is offered as a "social control." 1. What degree of clarity, precision, and conscious articulateness attaches to the norms of behaviour produced? 2. What degree of specific, immediate applicability to concrete situations attaches to such norms? 3. To what extent is the exercise of control rational, in the sense that the norms it produces are efficient solution responsively adapted to an informed understanding of the social situation to be controlled? 4. To what extent is the exercise of control rational, in the sense that the norms it produces are consistent and coherent with the 16 Secularism and Social Control overall pattern of other norms produced by the same social control? 5. What is the degree of conscious, deliberate purposiveness with which control is wielded? 6. To what extent is the functioning of the particular datum as a social con trot central (or "essential") rather than merely incidental to the main purposes or concerns for which the datum has grown up ? 7. To what extent does the control exercised operate directly on the behaviour involved, rather than by the more indirect means of altering the social, physical or attitudinal environment within which the behaviour occurs? 8. What is the degree and depth of awareness on the part of those controlled, that their behaviour is in fact being influenced? 9. To what degree are those exercising the control themselves obedient to its norms? 10. To what degree are those exercismg the control obedient, in their exercise of it, to other norms not themselves produced by the specific control in question, but arising from other forms of social control (including "popular morality") to which all those in the instant situation are subject ? 1I. What degree of creative invention, elaboration and adaptation of norms (whether conscious or not) does the exercise of the control involve? 12. To what extent is the performance of these creative and elaborative tasks facilitated by ready availability, variety, sophistication and easy manipulability of creative and elaborative techniques? 13. To what extent is the control concerned rather with the transmission and inculcation of existing norms, whether these arise from other social controls or from past exercises of the control now in question ? 14. What degree of elaborateness and social entrenchment attaches to the institutional arrangements through which control is wielded? 15. What degree of stability and continuity through time attaches to the' functioning of the control? A. R. Blackshield 17 16. Bow great a range of the members of the community is affected by the exercise of control? 17. How great a range of tye interests of those affected is subject to the exercise of control ? 18. To what degree do the norms produced in fact govern the behaviour of those to whom they are directed? 19. How important to society are the interests fostered or protected by the particular control? 20. To what degree is the presence (or even the absence) of actual obedience accompanied by emotional commitment to the content of the norms produced? 21. What range, weight and severity of sanctions are available for the correction or punishment of non-conformity? 22. With what degree of inexorability will the application of such sanctions follow on non-conformity? 23. To what extent is the efficacy of the particular datum as a control independent of the operation of other social controls? 24. To what extent is the operation of other social controls dependent upon the efficacy of the particular datum? The significance of these questions will emerge from the following comments. (i) The term "norm" and the term "control" are used throughout in the wide and flexible senses already referred to. (ii) Each question is so framed that (in theory at least) it is open to a simple answer in quantitative terms. It is not envisaged that these quantitative answers can be given with mathematical exactitude; we cannot say, for instance, that law as an instrument of social control has x units of articulate precision, whereas morality has only y units, But we can say that the norms of law are more precise and articulate that those of morals. In other words, what is here involved is the notion of a spectrum of degrees. Each of our twenty-four questions has a range of theoretically possible answers running from "Totally" to "Not at all." In this use of the spectrum notion I follow Julius Stone's recent analysis of power relations," itself building on P.H. Partridge's point that "power" is a matter for analysis in terms of different "dimensions" or "continuums.Y" Several of the above questions, indeed are derived from the 19. Stone, op, cit. supra n. 12, at 589ff., esp, 596-600. 20. P. H. Partridge, "Some Notes on the Concept of Powerl' (1963) Political Studies 107, esp, at 110, 113. 18 Secularism and Social Control six "spectrums" which Stone envisages as relevant to an understanding of power." l' (iii) Even when quantitative precrsron is disclaimed, the claim to rough estimates of more or less, of higher or lower on the spectrum, is still a rather misleading one as to some of the above questions, notably for instance as to questions (6) and (I 8). Such questions as to degree of importance of some interests over others, and degree of centrality to the "main purpose of a social phenomenon, may be verbally questions of degree, but in fact turn on complex questions of the substantive evaluation of some interests or purposes as concerned with others. Moreover, the evaluations involved may be made differently from different viewpoints. The spiritual interests which are furthered by religion, for example, may from the religious viewpoint itself be overwhelmingly the most important of all human interests; from an anti-religious or religiously neutral viewpoint, these interests may be quite immaterial. (The wording of question (18) in terms of what is important to society may to some extent insulate the question from this diversity of viewpoints. But even importance to society will still be estimated differently by the holy man, the legislator, and the industrial magnate.) Again, as to question (6), it is conceivable that the role played by the world's great religions in inculcating norms of morality, hygiene and even technology, and in securing their observance, might be thought of by a lawyer or sociologist as the central function of religion, while seeming the merest incidental to the holy man. The "spectrum" device here adopted is frankly inadequate to handle these complexities. (iv) Even where the questions of degree which the spectrum device imports can be answered in a meaningful and manageable way, they may not alway s be the most significant questions for an understanding of social control. As to question (17) above, for example, what is really important as we examine a particular social control is not how many human interests it affects, but which interests-vwhat kind of interestsit is characteristically or predominantly concerned with. The addition of question (18) does not really solve this problem. Similarly, as to the sanctions referred to in question (21), what really counts in characterizing and evaluating a particular social control is not merely the weight of sanctions, but the kind of sanctions available. When we seek to 21. Questions (15), (16) and (17) relate respectively to Stone's Time Count Spectrum, Head Count Spectrum, and Interests Affected Spectrum. Questions (9) and (10) are suggested ~. his Ethical Component Spectrum, questions (19) and (20) by his Influence Spectrum, and questions (21) and (22) by his Coercion Spectrum. In addition some of the questions presented-notably questions (5), (7), (8) and (24)-are directly suggested by Stone's own discussion of the concept of "social control." See op. cit. supra n. 12, at 743-~59, esp. 750ff. A. R. Blackshield 19 understand the social-control significance of an excommunication for heresy, quantitative questions of the weight of sanctions and of the number of interests protected or affected are simply not a sufficient key. (v) It might seem possible to reduce the complex unwieldiness of this double dozen of questions by showing that as between specific pairs of spectrums, placement on one will control placement on the other, so that only one of the two need be referred to. Certainly such correlations may be present, and the exploration of the possibility of a particular correlation, and of the conditions on which it will be present, may be of great sociological importance." But jurisprudents even more than sociologists should be aware that to assume such correlations ab initio will always be hazardous and often oversimplificatory. The assumptions that actual obedience [question (19)] can be automatically correlated with emotional commitment [question (20)] or with sanctioning power [question (21)] have distorted a good deal of legal theory. This is quite apart from the oversimplifications that may arise through simple failure to distinguish what are in fact separate questions, as with questions (1) and (2), or (21) and (22). The result is that at the present stage of sociological knowledge this cumbrous apparatus of twenty-four questions can probably not be simplified. (vi) Subject to comments (iii) and (il'), we may therefore say that the location of a particular form of social control on each of the twenty-four spectrums here indicated seems to offer an illuminating, a reasonably sufficient, and a not excessively unwieldy guide, to understanding the nature and the functioning of that particular control. (vii) Moreover, the displaying of these twenty-four spectrums seems to offer a similar guide to understanding of the nature and functioning of social control in general. Each spectrum is made meaningful by the supposition that the characteristic to which it refers might be found in a "pure" or "total" form. The spectrums direct us to ideas of articulate precision, concrete applicability, purposiveness, creativity, and the like, in a way that implies that an "ideal type"23 of social control would possess all these features simpliciter. And this is so, in the overlapping senses next to be explained. 22. One main aspect of the theme of H. Becker, cit. supra n. 4, is the correlation of emotional commitment [question (2)J directly with 'transmission" and inversely with creativity [questions (13), (II)]-i.e., emotional commitmens-c-reluctance to change -and of articulateness with "consistent" rationality [questions (I), (4)]. See infra at nn.80·85. 23. See Max Weber, c, 'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (transl. and ed.), Max Weber on-the Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949) 49, at 90-93. 20 Secularism and Social Control (viii) The twenty-four features of "ideal" social control might in theory be divided into four groups. One group would consist of features constitutive of the very idea of "social control." Unless, for example, the norms produced do in fact govern the behaviour of those to whom they are directed [question (19)], we might want to say that "social control" is simply not present at all. Similarly, perhaps, as to the feature of purposiveness referred to in question' (5) above. As to such defining characteristics of social control, the notion of a cluster of spectrums, despite its inadequacies, serves two very important purposes. First, it alerts us to the fact that in real-life examples of social control we must not expect to find the defining characteristics in the absolute form that a formal definition might lead us to expect. It leads us (for example) to say, not that social control must be purposive, and must in fact succeed in governing the relevant human behaviour, but, at the very most, that it must exhibit a fairly high degree of purposiveness and governance. Mort' persuasively still, it leads us to say merely that we may usually expect a social control to rate higher rather than lower on the purposiveness and governance spectrums. Only ifpurposiveness or governance are altogether lacking may we say that what we are looking at is not a social control at all. Secondly, the notion of a cluster of spectrums enables us to say that even if one of the "constituent" features is missing altogether, a high rating on other "constituent" spectrums may still enable us meaningfully to speak of "social control. "24 (ix) A second group of features of "ideal" social control may not be at all relevant to the identification of social data as social controls, not even in the flexible way that a cluster of spectrums entails. They are relevant rather to the evaluation of particular controls, once these have been identified as such. Thus obedience by the wielders of control to their own norms [question (9)] is in no way relevant to the question whether control is present or not; but most of us regard it as an important factor in deciding whether the particular means of control merits our ethical approval. So, perhaps, with the features referred to in questions (7) and (8). (x) A third group of features of "ideal" social control relates neither to the existence nor to the admirability of control, but merely to the efficiency with which the particular control is wielded. Concrete applicability [question (2)] and "purposive" rationality [question (3)] are probably among the features which fall within this group. (Xi) Finally, some of the features to which the twenty-four questions direct us may be significant merely as helping us to characterize the nature and methods of particular forms of social controls, and to distinguish one from another. The contrast in question (11) and (13) between creation of ~sp. 24. C! Lon L. Ruller's use of the spectrum notion in The Morality of Law (1964), at 4144. A. R. Blackshield 21 new norms and inculcation of old ones is probably significant only at this limited level. (xii) The four groups of features just identified may be referred to respectively as constituent factors, evaluative factors, efficiency factors and distinguishing factors. In practice, however, it is more often than not quite impossible to say with assurance that any particular spectrum is relevant to one of these groups, and one only. Is the precise formulation of articulate rules to govern human behaviour an indispensable characteristic, or at least a probable and important one, of all social control? Or is it an ideal result which we can say on ethical grounds that social control ought to attain ?25 Or should we say merely that control is likely to be more efficient with such rules than without them; or even merely that as a matter of fact some controls work with such rules and some do not? Similar questions arise in relation to almost every spectrum referred to. Moreover, the answers to such questions may be different for different controls. Awareness of the exercise of control by those subjected to it [question (8)] is probably (we said) an evaluative factor for all forms of control; and for some controls, for instance law, it is also an obvious and important efficiency factor. Yet for other controls it may be vital to efficiency and effectiveness that Such awareness is not allowed to enter. And similarly with the direct and indirect controls referred to in question (7). (xiii) Accordingly when, in examining any particular social control, we seek to locate it on each of the various spectrums, this location may have to be made differently from each of three different viewpoints. First, we need to ask, what place on each spectrum does this control in/act occupy? Second, what place ought it to occupy? And third, what place ought it to occupy, as this is seen by its architects and servitors themselves? In short, what place does it aspire to? (xiv) "Secularism" clearly refers to some adjustment, on one or more of these spectrums, of law, religion and education in their function as social controls. The precise nature of this adjustment will be examined in section IV. But if any such adjustment is to be meaningfully visualized, each of the controls involved must be briefly characterized in the light of the preceding questions. To this task we now turn. B. Law as an Instrument of Social Controls" The notion that law is somehow preeminent among .., all other social controls is' a reflection of three facts. First, law in Western societies 25. See, e.g., id, 63-65. 26. Cf Ross, op, cit. supra n, 17, at 106-125 j R. Pound, Social Control Through Law (1942). Secularism and Social Control 22 represents an unusually full development of all three of the broad aspects of a social control which were projected above. Whether we think of law as a body of norms, or a set of institutional arrangements, or a set of techniques and processes, it has in all three aspects a richness, an elaborateness, and an explicitness that no other method of social control can match. Second, the law is remarkable for the very high place which it occupies on all twenty-four of the spectrums here presented. If we ask what place on each spectrum lawyers and lawgivers aspire to, the answer will be in every case that they aspire to absoluteness. This aspiration, indeed, or rather this cluster of twenty-four aspirations, may be as close as we can come to a definition of law. ("Law is that form of social control which aspires to absolute precision and articulateness of norms, etc."?") If we ask what place on each spectrum the law ought to have, we shall receive conflicting answers; but on each spectrum there will not be lacking those who argue that the law should have an absolute place, and usually even the opponents of such a view will favour a high place on the spectrum. Thus clarity, precision, and conscious articulateness of norms mayor may not be absolute values for the law; but even those who insist that they are not will usually concede that they are values of considerable importance. At the very least, we can say that there is no one of our twenty-four features which it would be nonsensical to speak of as a value-standard for law. And even this modest claim can probably not be made in respect of any other social control. When we turn from questions of aspiration and oughtness, to questions of where in fact law is located on each spectrum, all talk of absoluteness must of course vanish. Even when the law's place at first appears to be absolute [questions (5), (6), and (8), for example], wiser second thoughts must lead to more cautious answers. Law does sometimes influence behaviour in ways which the lawgiver does not intend, and of which those influenced are not aware; and as to question (6), are we really prepared to say that the central purpose of law is social control rather than the doing of justice? Seen as questions of fact, moreover, our twenty-four questions will call for different answers for different systems of law, and even for the same system at different stages of its development. Here again, however, it is possible to say that the degree to which law possesses any particular feature will almost always be very considerable; and if we survey the whole history of Western civilization, it will often be found to be expanding-for examples, as to questions (9), (14), (17), (21). (Or is the apparent expansion merely a fluctuation ?) c 27. On the complexities here involved see A. R. Blackshield, "Some Approaches and Barriers to the Definition of Law," in I. Tammelo, A. Black shield, and E. Campbell (eds.), Australian Stxdies in Legal Philosophy (1963, published as A.R.S.P. Beiheft No. 39) 35. A. R. Black shield 23 The third way in which law claims preeminence among social controls can be more shortly stated. But it must probably be stated as a matter of legal aspiration, rather than one of fact. This is the double aspiration indicated by questions (1'3) and (24). Law aspires both to be itself independent of all other social controls, and to insist that no other social control be similarly independent of it. In other words, as Western legal systems have become progressively more elaborate and more strongly institutionalized, protecting progressively more (and more important) interests, and moving progressively closer to monopoly of the application of sanctions, law as here manifest has correspondingly tended to oust other social controls from its domain, except so far as these others are especially "endorsed" or "licensed" by law-in which case they may continue to operate with a kind of delegated validity. This legal development vis-a-vis religion has been one main strand in the growth of secularism in the West; but conversely, the secularist ouster of religion must be seen as only one strand in the legal tendency to oust all other social controls. C. Education as a Social Control'" The function of education as a means of social control is central to modern educational theory, especially in the United States, where educationists are found squarely to assert that "the imparting of knowledge is not the principal end of education.l's" At first, one may be indignantly prompted to take issue with such an assertion. No doubt it stops short of the cynical disregard for truth seen in the propagandist manipulations of a Hitler or a Goebbels. But it does seem to involve a triumph of pragmatism over truth," whose results may be hardly less disastrous. The conception of education as having to be directed beyond itself to social usefulness, to "serving the community" in non-educational ways,... is responsible not only for the steady fall in educational standards, the slighter and slighter literacy of the supposedly educated, but for what may fairly be called the growing industrialisation of educational institutions. This is exhibited not merely in their directing students to industry and thus engaging in the provision of the techniques which industry requires, but in their becoming more and more technological, applying techniques of teaching, overcoming "wastage" learning how to turn out the maximum number of technicians-and losing scholarship in theprocess.u 28. Cf. Ross, op, cit. supra n. 17, at 163-179; J. Dewey, "Education and Social Change" (1937) 3 Soci al Frontier 235, reprinted in W. O. Stanley, B. O. Smith, K. D. Benne, and A. W. Anderson (eds.), Social Foundations of Education (1956) 457-59. 29. Stanley et al., op. cit. 581. 30. On the broad philosophical issue here see A. R. Blackshield, "Pragmatism and Valid Law" (1961) 3 Syd, L. Rev. 492 ; id., "Empiricist and Rationalist Theories of Justice" (l962) 48 A.R.S.P. 25, § VIII. 31. John Anderson, "Classicism" [a paper presented to the Australian Humanities Research Council, originally printed in that Council's Fourth Annual Report (1960) 19-30], reprinted in id., Studies in Empirical Philosophy (1962) 189, at 190, 24 Secularism and Social Control This "inescapable contemporary phenomenon," and the controversies surrounding it, are linked by some with the increasing secularization of educational institutions in the West, and. in that regard must again be referred to in section V of this paper: At this stage, however, the matter need not be pursued. The present view, which may perhaps be dubbed "classical" view, is that the imparting of knowledge and the search for truth are important for their own sake, and that these must be the central concerns of educational activity. Yet even on this "classical" view, it must be conceded that education is also important for two other reasons. One is that it serves to equip those who exercise social controls with the shared understanding of factual knowledge and normative beliefs on which alone a wise and effective exercise of social control can be based. This educative function is not itself a social control, but is preparatory and indeed prerequisite for all "Social controls-above 'all for the conceptually puzzling yet crucial and all-pervasive "control" of individual initiative. The other reason for its importance is that education, seen as the means par excellence for "the transmission of culture," is itself a means of social control. Common educationss is concerned with the problem of maintaining the society as a closely knit and well integrated unit. It is only natural, therefore, that the rules and know ledges by which the people as a whole regulate their conduct and anticipate the behavior of one another should be its principal content. Not all the universals, however, will be contained in the common curriculum .... [Sjuch superficial elements as the method of greeting friends or the way to tie shoes ... are left to the individual to acquire informally and often unconsciously through participation in the common life of the people. Instead, the curriculum will tend to emphasize the more fundamental universals, or cultural core, such as the values, sentiments, knowledges, and skills that provide the society with stability and vitality and the individual with motivation and deep-lying controls of conduct,33 Conversely, even pragmatic views which most stress these "control" aspects, usually concede that the pursuit of knowledge as such is one important aspect of education. The imparting of knowledge may not be the "principal" end of education, but it is an indispensable end, without which the other ends are distorted and defeated. Knowledge has always been a primary concern of the educator. It is the basis for his expert authority. Without knowledge of the truth, and of the method by which it is attained, intelligent, self-directing personalities cannot be developed....The ideal of truth and the scientific method is not, of course, exclusive to the educational profession. But, by the very nature of their craft, the educator and the 32. Here distinguished from "special" education for particular skills and tasks (including, of course, those of social control referred to above). 33. B. 0. Smith, W.O. Stanley, and J. H. Shores (eds.), Fundamentals of Curriculum Development (1950) 10-11, reprinted in Stanley et al., op, cit. supra n. 23, at 38. A. R. Blackshield 25 scholar are devoted to that idea; many would say that it is their first and primary loyalty.st In short, it is common ground that education is concerned (i) with the imparting of knowledge for-its own sake; (ii) with the imparting of knowledge, values and skills to be used in individual and "professional" Q exercise of social control; and (iii) with social control by inculcation of the society's accepted norms. Controversy arises only as to the order of priority amongst these concerns. The totalitarian propagandist would see (iii) as primary, (ii) as important only insofar as incidental to (iii), and (i) as of slight concern. The pragmatist sees (ii) as primary, (i) as important because incidental to (ii), and (iii) as of very great importance, but nevertheless as qualified by the demands of both (i) and (ii). On the present "classical" view (i) is primary, (ii) and (iii) being alike important in an undeniable but incidental way. In the present terms the conflict between these views may be said to relate to the desirable placement of education on the "control orientation" spectrum referred to in question (6). On the classical view education ought to rank low on this spectrum; on the pragmatist and propagandist views it ought to rank high. The aspirations of teachers themselves will generally accord with the classical view; indeed, pragmatist educationists s.ee their main role in terms of raising and widening what they regard as unduly narrow teacher-aspirations. (They may even be thus led to some overstatement of their position for rhetorical, "crusading" reasons.") But in terms of sociological fact, education will always have a high degree of control-orientation; whatever the educators' aspirations, their "socializing" function will always be a vital aspect of their work. These complexities as to education's control-orientation must of course affect the nature of its actual social control. But some main points can be shortly stated. On the propagandist view, education will be characterized by its high place on the purposiveness and emotional commitment spectrums [questions (5) and (20)], its low place on the directness and awareness spectrums [questions (7) and (8)], and its probable low place on the reflexivity and external limitation spectrums [questions (9) and (10)]. On the pragmatist view, such norms as do emerge from the educational process may perhaps be characterized by a high degree of "purposive" rationality [question (3)]; but in point of fact (this view will add) the production of norms will not be a significant feature of social control through education at all. The significant thing will be the high place of education on the "control of controls" spectrum [question (24)]; and education will then need to be characterized by the, qualities it induces Op, et loco cit. supra n. 29. 35. Leading others in turn to revive the old gibe that "Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach"-adding that those who cannot even teach write about education, 34. 26 Secularism and Social Control in the norms produced by other social controls. Its aspiration for those other norms will be to a high place on the creativity and technique spectrums [questions (11) and (12)], as well as on the "purposive" rationality spectrum [question (3)]. Q'l the Classical view, insofar as this recognizes "social control" functions for education at all, these will still be characterized by a low rating as to purposiveness of control [question (5)]; but also by a very high place on the transmission spectrum [question (l3)]-and (since this view will tend to stress the general intellectual values which are sought in education) on the "consistent" rationality spectrum [question (14)] as well. Perhaps (though more hazardously) some further remarks can be ventured which will apply on any view of the educative process. One is that a high place on the transmission spectrum [question (13)] is probably constitutive of the very idea of education as a social control. For education is "the transmission from one generation to the next by word of mouth or written symbols of the accumulated knowledge of the species.?" Its actual transmission rating will be somewhat lower on the propagandist and pragmatist views than on the classical, but it will stilI be considerable; and if it drops too low, most of us will want to say that we are no longer talking about "education" at all. Beyond this, we can say that social control through education is always likely to display a low rating in terms of directness and awareness [questions (7) and (8)]. Propaganda techniques exploit these low ratings; but they exist in any case. Similarly, education is likely always to rank high in terms of interests affected, actual obedience, emotional attachment and "control of controls" [questions (17), (19), (20), (24)]. Finally, it should be noted that as Western civilization has proceeded, education has come to occupy an increasingly significant place on the institutionalization spectrum [question (14)].37 If the gradual specialization and institutionalization of schooling was slow at first, it has steadily increased as the skills required for ordinary social intercourse and for the fulfilment of social roles become ever more multiple and diversified; and the very gradualness of the process suggests a general "law of social evolution" that "the worth of a function must be demonstrated through the services of the unspecialized agency before a specialized agency is brought into existence in the social order."38 The implication that once worth is proven, specific agencies tend to evolve, would explain the overall trend to specialization of soc.al institutions of which secularization is but a part. Yet equally interesting, and of rather converse significance, is the 36. Carrington,.'Jp. cit. supra n, 3, at 145. 37. For a good short summary of the development from primitive times to the present, see J. C. Chapman and G. S. C c unts, Principles of Education (1924) 37-45, reprinted in Stanley et al., op, cit. supra n, 28, at 53-57. 38. Chapmanand Counts, op, cit. 38 (Stanley et al., op, cit. 54). 27 A. R. Blackshield fact that the most potent single influence, in the institutionalizing process seems to have been that of religion. The role of the medieval "schoolmen" in building the first Western schools and universities round a nucleus of half-informal monastic lessons is well known.t" but even in pre-history the religious role was significant. Around the "immeasurably precious" religious traditions of every people, there gradually evolved an order of specialists whose sole business was to preserve this lore and, through its use, to promote the welfare of the group. In the hands of the specialist, whether priest, shaman, medicine man, or magician, this body of tradition was graduaIly elaborated and consequently became, in yet greater measure, the unique possession of a class. This made necessary the formal organization of instruction about certain callings intimately associated with the life of the group. In one way or another, provision was made for the selection of promising youth who, under the direct tuition of the elders, were trained to discharge this important and esoteric social function. Out of this situation emerge the beginnings of professional training.s? D. Religion as a Social Control'? On the "classical" view of education, perhaps the most significant feature of its function as a social control is its intrinscally low rating on the control-orientation spectrum [question (6)]. At first sight, this might seem to apply to religion as a social control as well. Certainly religion presents itself to the modern Western mind as distinctively and centrally oriented to other-worldly ends, or at least to ends which are not of this world; and certainly the attempt to confine religion to such ends is a major feature of many "secularist" ideologies. Yet to an important degree this religious unworldliness seems to be a result of the secularizing process, rather than a datum which can be presupposed in our discussion of that process. In other words, religion may tend to be pushed into unworldliness as its worldly concerns come progressively to be duplicated, overridden and ousted by other cultural forces. In any case, the emphasis on religious unworldliness is just the kind of oversimplification against which David Martin's essay should be taken as sounding a warning. Max Weber long ago pointed out that For the empirical student, the sacred values, differing among themselves, are by no means only, nor even preferably, to be interpreted as "other-worldly." This is so quite apart from the fact that not every religion, nor every world religion, knows of a "beyond" as a locus of definite promises. At first the sacred values of primitive as weIl as of cultured, prophetic or non-prophetic, religions were quite solid goods of 39. See David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (1962) 71-92, 40. Chapman and Counts, op, cit. 40 (Stanley et al., op, cit. 55). 41. C{. Ross, op. cit. supra n. 17, at 126-145, 196-217. < < 28 Secularism and Social Control this world. With the only partial exception of Christianity42 and a few other specifically ascetic creeds, they have consisted of health, a long life, and wealth .... Only the religious virtuoso, the ascetic, the monk, the Sufi, the Dervish strove for sacred values, which were "otherworldly" as compared with sucri! solid goods of this world, as health, wealth, and long life. And (even) these other-worldly sacred values were by no means only values of the beyond. ~3 Martin" adds the further point that the supposed criterion of "other-worldiness" is in any event a category of concealed multiple reference. It may refer to "a belief in life after death which serves to render life here and now more tolerable." But it may also refer to the lack of concern with material practicalities personified by "the hobo, or fakir, who is only interested in an intrinsically worthwhile state of being (or non-being), which he achieves within the world as now constituted either by the discovery of the true self or by the immolation of self." The rejection of material benefits then extends to the benefits of "life after death" as well. Thirdly, the "other world" on which belief is focused may be a Utopia which is ultimately to be realized in this world, or "an eternally present and perfect original of which the corrupted material world is but a copy." And all these "types" of other-worldly belief may themselves conceal a further multiplicity of actual beliefs, in which features of the different "types" cross and interpenetrate with each other. The concept of a life to come might be couched either in the form of an intrinsically worth-while state or in the form of gross materiality. Alternatively, the progress towards an intrinsically worth-while state might be conceived either solely in terms of the present world or in tern.s of several lives to come. Nor would belief in a world hereafter prevent proper and successful attention to events here and now. 45 We cannot, in short, assign anyone meaning to "other-worldliness" which would allow us intelligibly to refer to it as a significant "constituent factor" or "primal motivation" of religiousness; and even if we could, we would not be able to affirm with any empirical accuracy that this was in 42. See infra at nn. 140-145. 43. Max Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (transl, and ed.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1947) 267, at 277. At 278 he adds that even those objectives which are "other-worldly" from the religious viewpoint are not so socio-psychologically. States of religious ecstasy, grace, bh akti, and the like "have been sought, first of all, for the sake of such emotional value as they directly offered the devout"-as much as "the religious and alcoholic intoxication of the Dionysian or the soma cult:' Cf. in like vein Auguste Comte, 2 The Positive Philosophy (transl. H. Martineau, 1896) 546 : "It is so difficult to us to conceive of any but a "metaphysical theology, that we are apt to fall into perpetual mistakes in contemplating... its gross origin." 44. Essay cited supra n. 6, at 171-72, 45. [d. l'Zl. A. It Blackshield fact the "constituent factor" or "primal motivation." It follows that an inlferently low placement of religion on the "control-orientation" spectrum simply cannot be sustained, at any rale not on the "other-worldliness" ground. Nor, indeed, are we really able to make any general assertion about the placement of religion on the "control-orientation" spectrum at all. For the test to which question (6) above refers us ["central (or 'essential') " to the main purposes or concerns for which the datum has grown up"] must refer either to some supposed "constituent factor" of religion, having conceptual primacy in our understanding of the religious way of life, or to some historically first motivation to religiousness which is supposed to set the key for the "proper" sphere of development of religious influence. But any attempt to describe religion in terms of a central "constituent factor" faces difficulties of conceptual unclarity, and of actual religious diversity," as great as those affecting the "other-worldly" criterion just examined. And if we seek instead for historical and anthropological guidance to some historically first motivation, we find only that further difficulties, of the inaccessibility to modern knowledge of the birth of human culture, must be added to all the others. We cannot even begin to guess what the "central" or "essential" motivations leading to the growth of religious institutions might have been. Neither religions nor men arc open books. They have been historical rather than logical or even psychological constructions without contradiction. Often they have borne within themselves a series of motives, each of which, if separately and consistently followed through, would have stood in the way of the others or run against them head-on. In religious matters "consistency" has been the exception and not the rule.t? Our characterization of religion as a means of social control must therefore be cautious and fragmentary. The most that we can do is to list some of the features, and some of the motivations, that may be significant in the growth of religion, or in its cultural specialization. In the present state of knowledge the list must be treated as a random one, with no implication that its numerical ordering represents either a graduated order of "centrality" to religion, or a chronological order of historical emergence. We need to bear in mind, too, that the features listed are by no means all applicable to all religions. Some of them, indeed, may be mutually inconsistent; and even when certain groups of features seem naturally consonant with one another, we must be cautious about assuming that such apparently related features do in fact entail or grow, out of one another. Only within such a fragmentary, unsystematic framework as 46. See supra p. 1 (pace Malinowski, up. cit. supra n. 3, at 61, who thinks that the unity of religion in "s.ubstance, for!E.i!!l.d. f!!nctionis t~ound everywhere"). 47. Weber, op, ~it":"'supritii~ 43, at 291;,. Secularism and Social Control this can we begin to assess the possible ratings of "religion" on OUr spectrunis of social control. (i) The first item in the list can perhaps be asserted (though even here not without hazard) as the historically first motivation to religiousness. As men or their hominoid ancestors come together in social groups, they develop very early in' pre-history a sympathy and affection for one another. When a beloved member of the group dies, he will be mourned, his memory will be respected, and his mortal remains will be disposed of with some simple, reverential form of ritual. In China archaeologists have found remains of ritual burials among the pithecanthropoids of the Pleistocene Age, about 400,000 years ago-"the evidence of the earliest reverence for the dead in human history.":" And with Neanderthal man in the Mousterian period (some 160,000 years ago, still many thousands of years before the beginnings of human history), magico-religious ritual burials appear in a much advanced form, suggesting "both genuine love, and also fear of the possible supernatural consequences of neglect." Moreover, the fact that in one find all the males had been buried facing west, but the sole female had not, "suggests that the Neanderthalers may have conceived of a heaven, comparable to the ancient Egyptian 'land of the dead,' which lay in the direction of the setting sun. The woman, we may assume, was either denied access to this heaven, or had one of her own in the opposite direction.'?" When, as in China or among the Bantu, this bare minimal "religiousness"-the ritual expression of reverence and affection for the memory of the dead-s-is extended and elaborated into ancestor worship, the channelling of this motivation into significant social control would appear to be obvious.s? Yet we cannot assume that such a development of this motif will automatically follow. From the standpoint of simple social evolutionism this assumption has indeed often been made, ancestor worship being then presented as a phase through which all religions must pass;" but in fact true ancestor worship seems comparatively rare." Even when it does occur, its influence as social control may be less marked than it seems. Max Weber has pointed out that in some areas where we might expect Chinese ancestor worship to operate as a social control, the position is just the reverse. Far from a man's social status and public office being determined by the number 48. See Carrington, op, cit. supra n. 3, at 93. 49. [d. 107-111, esp. at 110. And on the still greater development in Neolithic time see id. 182. 50. See Ross, op, cit. supra n. 17, at 133-34. 51. See W.G. Sumner and A.G. Keller, 3 Science of Society (1928) 941·46 4 id. 412-17; E.W. Hopkins, Origin and Evolution of Religion (1923) ch. 7. And for an example of how true theism might evolve out of ancestor worship, see N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (transi. W. Small, 1874) 164·67. 52. Paul Radin, "Ancestor Worship:' in I Encyc, Soc. Sc, 53, at 54. A. R. Black shield j1 or dignity of his ancestors or by the elaborateness or piety of his worship of them, status and role dictate how many ancestors may be worshipped, and with what degree of ceremony." Arid generally, "whether ancestor worship has any marked influence oh so-called progress and whether it in any way circumscribes thought and action and makes for rigid conformity, is more than doubtful.v'" Yet, even if we look only to "the milder form of this same phenomenon, the veneration of one's ancestors.?" this does seem to offer at least potentialities for social control. The mere remembering of these past lives, a fortiori when conjoined with and reinforced by emotions of reverence and affection, will tend to induce the repetition and perpetuation of the ways of conduct of those lives. Not only can the "great men" of the past, "prophets, saviors, saints, revolutionary heroes, and great presidents and lawgivers" be "invoked as socializing examples;" but on a humbler level notions of "what our grandfathers did" can operate as a social control." "Commemorative ceremonial. .. plays a significant part in the perpetuation of. .. evaluations."?" (ii) Dating also from palaeolithic pre-history is what Auguste Comte called "fetishism"-"that tendency of our nature by which Man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own, with differences of mere intensity.r" It is, more briefly, the spiritualization of materiality: "the ascription of being, on the pattern of that known in human beings, to the external world. "59 Since E.B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), it has been more satisfactorily referred to as "animism," the word "fetishism" being reserved rather for the converse process of materialization of spirituality ("any sort of materialism in religion, any tendency to treat divine power or mind as having a body or as operating like a physical force")." Tyler's view of animism as the belief that natural phenomena have spiritual, "personalized" souls perhaps insufficiently stresses its potential for social control. Such a belief can never be mere belief, but must 53. Max Weber, "The Chinese Literati," in Gerth and Mills, op, cit. supra n. 37, 416 at 423. 54. Radin, Encyc, Soc. Sc. article cited supra n. 52, at 55. 55. Ibid. 56. Becker, cit. supra n. 4, at 150-51. 57. Id, 151,52. On the social functions of religious ritual generally, see Malinowski, op, cit. supra n. 3, at 4-5. 58. See Comte, 2 op, cit. supra n. 43, at 545-561. 59. Ruth Benedict, "Animism," in 1 Encyc, Soc. Sc, 65, at 65. 60. R.R. Marett, "Fetishism," in 6 id. 201. at 201. And cf, id.. 202, quoting E.B. Tylor, 2 Primitive Culture (3 ed. 1891) 144. 32 Secularism and Social Control operate directly to determine human behaviour;" and since Tylor wrote its behaeioural aspect has been increasingly stressed. Our present day dichotomy of behavior has two distinct types: the type directed toward things, which follows strictly a cause and effect sequence; and the type directed toward persons, which, runs the gamut from love to manipulation. but which deals in only small degree with measurable cause end effect. Of this dichotomy primitive man knew little ... [HJe knew thing-techniques, but he did not regard them as ruling out person-techniques. He harangued the tree as bride or as child, taking it to wife with the ordinary marriage rites, or cradling it according to the ceremonial of childbirth, at the same time and place that he demonstrated his mastery of felling large trees without the use of iron. He simply made no dichotomy where with us it has become fundamental. 62 Nor is it merely a matter of pleasant social intercourse with animals and trees. "The first manifestation of religion springs from a basic practical need just as surely as pure science evolves from the technological organization of the environment."63 In a simple hunting society the forests and their denizens are the foundation of human survival, and if these are endowed with personalized "spirits," then the maintenance of good relations with these must be a basic goal of social life. Hunting, and later agriculture, must depend on "person-techniques" as well as "thingtechniques;" and even after a hunted animal is captured and eaten, its remains must be subjected to an elaborate propitiatory ritual "to ensure that another ... wilI be sent to the hunters by the spirits of the forest, and equally successfully slain. "64 Here again, remains of ritual disposition of bear skulls among the Neanderthals suggest that this motivation to religiousness pre-dates human history itself." (iii) R. R. Marett has suggested that animism, which spiritualizes the natural world in a specific, personalized way, is not sufficient as a key to understanding of primal religiousness. It needs to be supplemented, he thinks, by reference to two other phenomena found in the most primitive societies, related to but "not wholly explicable in terms of" animism. One is belief in mana, "a contagious wonder working power of a more or less impersonal kind," which he calls "animatism" as distinct from animism." The other is "anthropomorphic theism involving high gods conceived 61. On this essential action-motivating power as a haIlmark of all religious beliefs, see E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (trans!. l.W. Swain, 1954) 416. Durkheim's thesis however oversimplifies certain deep contrasts between, e.g., Christianity and Hinduism. See infra §§ Il l, IV. 62. Ruth Benedict, Encyc. Soc. Sc. article cited supra n. 59, at 66. 63. Carringfpn, op. cit. supra n. 3, at 177. 64. Id.178. 65. ld. 105-07. 66. Cf. M. Mauss and H. Hubert, "Esquisse d'une Theorie Generate de fa Magie" (1902) Annee Sociol.rgique 16, as reprinted in part in 1. Parsons, E. Shils, K.D, Naegele and l.R. Pitts (eds.), 2 Theories of Society (1961) 1081-91. A. R. B1ackshield 33 as 'magnified non-natural men.' "67 As with animism, such beliefs have an impact on human behaviour; but here the incipient social control is much more potent. For here, the belief is in spirits not merely like additional reduplications of the human spirit, but other than and more than the human spirit. As the power of the spirit is greater, so is the need to propitiate and obey that power; and as the nature of the spirit is more transcendent, so is the experience of communicating with the spirit. Talking to a tree in which a "personal" spirit lives is no more precious a spiritual experience than talking to one's neighbour-perhaps less so, since trees are so much harder to talk to. But talking to a god is a rare and privileged experience which even in one's own eyes lifts one altogether out of the ordinary realm of everyday life. In the eyes of one's fellows it lifts one almost into the transcendent realms which the gods themselves inhabit. ~nevitable (iv) These various movements towards religion merge into a single theme which perhaps can be taken as a generalization about what is meant by religion. This is simply that "religion" turns on a belief that the shaping of the external world and of the events in it must be attributed not merely to the natural physical phenomena themselves, and to the purposive action of the human will, but also (or even rather) to the presence of purposeful agencies which transcend, or lie hidden in, such "natural" agencies. It has as its object some imputed, non-natural "soul" (or "souls")-whether these be former human souls revered retrospectively (or as supposedly continuing to exist de praesenti in some other world); or "human" souls imputed to non-human but actual entities; or super-human souls imputed to super-human and themselves putative entities; or some generalized super-human "soul" unfettered by imputation to any existent or even imagined entity. Religion, in short, is always a super-naturalism. Howard Becker suggests that this is the "essence" of religion, which we have here despaired of finding; and he blames such epochal figures as Emile Durkheim'" and W.G. Sumner" for having "befogged" this simple truth "by using all-inclusive and vague categories.:"? (v) On such a basis religion in all undeveloped societies reaches out inevitably to a very high place on a number of significant "spectrums" of social control. Certainly "supernaturalism" as a concept for sociologists needs to be sharply defined and carefully hemmed in if it is to be a useful 67. Marett, Encyc, Soc. Sc. article cited supra n. 60, at 202; and cf id., The Threshold of Religion 12 ed. 1914). 68. See his classic study cited supra n. 61 (first published in.French in 1912). 69. See Sumner and Keller, o p, cit. supra n. 51; and cf, Sumner's monumental work Folkways (1906). 70. Becker, cit. supra n. 4, at 144. As a modern example of the fruitful use of this simple notion he cites W. J. Goode, Religion Among the Primitives (1951). . 34 Secularism and Social Control concept; yet supernaturalism as a fact for primitive man is indeed potentially all-inclusive. It follows that the rating of religion in terms of "head count," "interests affected," and" importance" [questions (16), (17), (18)] is potentially a total one." There is no object of human endeavour, no area of human activity, which is not open to spiritualization in animist, animatist, or even theist terms, and therefore in need not only of "thingtechniques" of behaviour, but of "person-techniques" and even "superperson techniques" as well. And it is precisely in relation to those objects and activities that are most important to society that these needs are most strongly felt. "What but the theological spirit could afford a ground for social discipline at a time when foresight, collective and individual, was far too restricted to sustain any influence of rationality ?"7 2 On such a basis, we must finally abandon any notion that the religious rating in terms of control-orientation is inherently a low one. Those very activities which are seen as so vital as to demand some social control are those which most urgently give rise to religious behaviour. We need not dwell on the point that when animist belief brings non-human entities into the "personalized" community, attempts to propitiate and influence these are themselves exertions in "social" control. The more important point is that it is human behaviour towards these entities which it is sought to regulate. (vi) On such a basis, too, the range of sanctions involved in religion is potentially unlimited-both in number and in weight. Once any form of supernaturalism is accepted, all the forms of misfortune and suffering that befall a man can be explained by the fact that he displeased the supernatural power in question, or even that he has simply failed to get it on his side." Nor are the supernatural sanctions limited, as John Austin sought to limit legal sanctions," to the infliction of punishment. Precisely because suffering is treated as "a symptom of odiousness in the eyes of the gods and as a sign of secret guilt,"75 its converse can be treated as a sign of favour. The fortunate is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune .... If the general term "fortunate" covers all the "good" of honour, 71. The thesis "that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion," that "religion has given birth to all that is essential in society," was the main theme of Durkheirn , op, cit. supra n. 61. See his summation at 418. 72. Cont,e, op, cit. supra n. 43, at 552. 73. On the range and effectiveness of supernatural sanctions see the materials collected in S.P. Simpson and J. Stone (eds.), 1 Law and Society (1949) 19 ff'., 150160. 74. J~hPl\u.stin, 1 Lectures on Jurisprudence (5 ed. by R. Campbell, 1885) 90-91. 75. Weber, cit. supra n, 43, at 271, 36 Secularism and Social Control general" are characterized by their high placement on what I have here called the "emotional commitment" spectrum [question (2' )]. The corollary of this, he urges, is that far from displaying the easy adaptability apparently envisaged by Comte, "sacred" beliefs in general will show a positive resistance to change. The whole broad contrastbetween "sacred" and "secular" phenomena is itself to be understood by reference to a spectrum or continuum of shadings of degree. Placement on this spectrum is to be determined by the question: To what degree are the norms and values which the social mechanism "imparts to or elicits from its members" open to alteration, "if at all, only in the fact of definite emotionalized reluctance?"81 High placement on this "emotional resistance" spectrum denotes sacredness; low placement, secularity." In the present terms, this important test involves the following findings. First, "problems relating to social and cultural change ... are built into the sacred-secular scale, as are also what in some ways are their counterparts, problems of social contro]."83 Religion" must always have a significant place on our control-orientation spectrum [question (6)]; social control, if not "central" to religion, will at any rate be intimately bound up with it. Second, religion as a social control will now tend to a low rating on the creativity spectrum [question (11)]. It will tend, indeed, to induce positive hostility to creative adaptations and to reinforce this hostility with the same emotive intensity as it brings to the existing norms themselves." Third, consequentially, the inculcation of these existing 80. See infra n. 84. 81. See Becker, cit. supra n. 4, at 142 if. His consequential definition of the "secular" is however more puzzling. He is concerned to stress that "the secular is not merely the reverse of the sacred;" and he therefore defines it as the single-minded pursuit of "ends, tangible or intangible" regardless of what changes this involves in our felt "needs" or in the realization of these (ibid.). On this view his earlier example (id. 134) or" Father Damien's "missionary martyrdom" among the lepers of Molokai would seem to be a "secular" and not a "sacred" pursuit of values. And this would sit strangely both with popular understanding, and with his own main analysis. [See also his Through Values to Social Interpretation (1946).1 It seems better to say that on the above view of the "sacred," the "secular" is merely its reverse: that is a willingness to accept change even in basic values. And his 1957 essay here cited seems finally to slip back into this view (e.g., at 143-44). Perhaps it is just a matter of unfortunate wording at 142. 82. Cf, Carrington, op. cit. supra n. 3, at 197. 83. Becker, cit. supra n. 4, at 142. 84. We have already seen (supra at n, 70) that the "sacred" on this basis will comprise far more than "the religious, divine, spiritual and so on;" and the "secular" far more than "the avowedly non-religious, profane, or skeptical." See Becker's 1957 essay at 142; aIM cf. his 1946 work cited supra n.81 at 43-44, 24850. But he still places religion at the "maximum-plus" end of the sacred-secular spectrum. See the 1957 essay at 144; but cf'. his further caveats at 145. 85. C/' ~ main theme of J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (2 ed. 1952), e.g., at 2-4. A. R. Blackshield 37 norms in new generations will be of vital religious concern; religion will rank high on our norm-transmission spectrum [question (13)]. And similarly as to the continuity spectrum [question (15)]. Finally, insofar as emotionalized attachment to norms is of the essence of religious control, this view again confirms our finding that such control may often rank low on the "rationality" spectrums referred to in questions (3) and (4). At any rate "rationality," in either of the senses there referred to, will not be of primary religious importance. (x) The high control-orientation of religion has already been sufficiently stressed; but perhaps something should be added as to its special linkage with those aspects of interpersonal behaviour which we think of as "ethical" or "moral."?" We have seen that in animism behaviour towards natural and spiritual non-human entities is seen as continuous with that towards other human beings, in an undifferentiated range of "persontechniques." But this continuity works both ways. The greater socioeconomic importance of relations with non-human entities may tend even from the beginning to associate religious requirements and sanctions especially with these; but the power which such requirements and sanctions acquire in this area will then extend without interruption to the whole range of "person-techniques." And as supernatural sanctions come to cover every kind of human misfortune, notions of ethical wrongdoing will develop in direct response to this sanctioning power. Not only does this explanatory justification for ethical prescriptions lie naturally and readily to hand, but it is often difficult to see what other explanation or justification there can be. "Morals and religion are inextricably joined-the moral standards generally accepted in Western civilization being those belonging to Christianity. Outside Christendom other standards derive from other religions. None of these moral codes can claim any validity except by virtue of the religion on which it is based.':" (Xi) In general, the qualities so far surveyed in relation to "primitive" religions persist into "advanced" religions as well, though with some shifts and fluctuations in emphasis. But there are at least two interrelated factors in the rise of "advanced" religions that lead to important changes in the nature of religion as a social control. The first of these is the great drive, as human rationality grows, to "rationalize" religion. This drive presents itself in many manifestations. But "behind them always lies a stand towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically 'senseless';" a demand "that the world order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful 'cosmos.' "88 This association 86. Cf generally Malinowski, op, cit. supra n. 3. 87. Devlin, op. cit. supra n. 9, at 4-5. 88. Weber, cit. supra n. 43, at 281. Thus in Comte's view (op. cit. supra n. 43, at 547) "The obscure pantheism which is so rife among German metaphysicians, is only fetichism generalised and made systematic." 38 Secularism and Social Control of religious belief with the search for rationally-ordered knowledge is, of course, at the basis of the religious midwifery of the educational quest for khowledge, ultimately to be differentiated as a distinct social phenomenon. But it also leads, within the corpus of religious norms and r..eliefs themselves, to aspiration for-and partial attainment of-s-a much higher place on the "consistent" rationality spectrum," and perhaps on that of "purposive" rationality as.well [question (4), (3)]. Certainly it is through the quest for metaphysical, cosmological, "religious" rationality that our appreciation of "purposive" rationality gradually emerges. (Xii) The other development, reaching back into "primitive" times but attaining its real significance for social control in the West only in the Middle Ages, is the development of a specialized priesthood. Sacerdotal authority is indispensable to render available the civilizing quality of theological philosophy. All doctrine must have special organs, to direct its social application; and the necessity is strongest in the case of religious doctrine, on account of its indefinite character, which compels a permanent exercise of active discipline, to keep the vagueness and indefiniteness within bounds.v? In other words, as religion as a social control develops, it moves to a steadily burgeoning place on the institutionalization spectrum [question (14)]. This development, moreover, shifts religious control to a significant place on the purposiveness spectrum [question (5)J, and makes a high degree of control-orientation finally unequivocal. It joins with and intensifies the trend to conscious rationalization just discussed; and it brings the high placement of religion on most of the spectrums here reviewed from the level of mere sociological fact, to the level of conscious aspiration. With reference to at least half of our twenty-four questions [(13) to (24) inclusive], we can then say that even when in fact the rating of religion is short of a total one, and is even declining, the aspiration of the specialized priesthood will still be for a total rating. Above all, of course, this will be true for what gradually begin to emerge as the specialized religious values: the priestly aspiration that human activities "be regulated ritually and, above all, controlled hierocratically" will be asserted specifically in relation to the "quest for salvation."?' But the range of human activities deemed relevant to this quest will tend to be extended, by the priesthoods of almost all religions, to cover virtually every aspect of life in human society. III. SOME FACTORS IN SECULARIZATION IN THE WEST Just as in the previous section my purpose was not to describe the functioning of religion as a social control, but to draw together some of the 89. See M ..x Weber, "Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions," in Gerth and Mills, op. cit. supra n. 43, 323 at 324. 90. Comte,2 op. cit. supra n. 43, at 549. 91. See ",;,eber, cit. supra n. 43, at 282-83. And cf, Bury, op, cit. supra n. 85 at 3. A. R. Blackshield 39 factors that may lead to its assuming such a function, so in the present J'sectio'}'I am concerned not to recount the history of the gradual shift to secularism in Western civilization, but merely to list at random some of the factors that may have contributed to sbe shift. Such an enterprise calls for caveats similar to those lodged elsewhere in this essay. We must not assume that these factors or any of them necessarily entail each other; some of them may indeed squarely conflict with each other. Nor can we assume that the occurrence of any or even all of these factors will automa tically induce secularization, nor that when secularization does occur it is always explicable in terms of such factors. "All institutions expand and decline for a wide variety of reasons, and religious institutions are no exception. For example, the contemporary decline in religious institutions may be part of the general malaise which is offsetting every social institution in a time of rapid social change.t'v- Even when more specific factors can be asserted to be in play in a particular time and place, they may be neither amenable to formulation in sociological laws, nor in any case likely to be repeated. Nor, finally, can we assume that even when secularization is set in train, its subsequent progress is always automatic and irreversible. In many instances secularization has been followed by renewed "sacralization," sometimes as a direct result." One complexity must be stressed above all. We have here hypothesized that secularization is not to be understood in terms of the decline, dissipation or denigration of religious faith, but rather as a disengagement of other social controls (particularly the legal and educative) from dependence on religious controls, which in the sphere remaining to them may continue to be strong. Yet plainly, in a community in which religious convictions retain their full share of emotional commitment, the emancipation of law and education is not likely to be tolerated. However it be in theory, the historical fact is that the increasing range and self-sufficiency of "secular" legal-political and educational institutions has been accompanied by a waning of religious influence. On the one hand, as effective religious control fades from specific areas of social life, the functions thus vacated are filled by expanded legal power, whether by conscious lawyers' movement to fill the breach, or by an unplanned compensatory tendency. On the other hand, as legal expansion consciously ousts or reduplicates the functions of religious control, the effectiveness of the latter is weakened not only in the disputed terrain, but by reaction also throughout the range of religious operations. Secularism, in short, involve, both a weakening of religion and a strengthening of law, as factors which mutually accelerate each other. Whether the causal or dominant role in any particular transfer 92. Martin, essay cited supra n. 6, at 176. 93. This is another important theme of Becker's essay cited supra 173-76. D. 4; see esp, 40 Secularism and Social Control of power from religion to the law is to be accorded to religious decline or to legal aggressiveness, is a question we must decline to answer. The practical difficulty which confronts us in this interplay between the shifting fortunes of religion and other social controls Is obvious enough. In the search for "secularizing" factors we must necessarily look to the growth of cultural attitudes of indifference, neutrality and hostility to religion, and of concern with, and positive valuing of, materialist "values." We cannot explain secularism in terms of secularism itself: we must somehow struggle to take account of the whole of "rolled-up materialism," in all its amorphous massiveness. The conceptual difficulty is more troublesome still. If secularism is so intimately bound up with the cultural attitudes just mentioned, how can we then maintain our hypothesis that these cultural attitudes must be kept conceptually distinct from secularism itselfthat "secularism" is one thing and "rolled-up materialism" another? This difficulty leads V. P. Luthera, in his valuable study of India as a secular state," to a rather puzzling conclusion. Though his main positions on "the secular state" closely parallel the present view," he insists that "secularism" is an altogether different concept; and that this concept does refer to an anti-religious "ideology," which is "materialistic in tone and holds that human improvement can be sought through material means alone.'?" The following paragraphs will often seem to support this interpretation; for "secularism," "rolled-up materialism," and even "anti-religiousness" will here seem to run together. Yet it remains true that these three notions can be held apart. The growth of "rolled-up materialism" may for some men have led to some tendency to anti-religiousness, but it does not necessarily do so. "Rolled-up materialism" has also developed (and continued to flourisb) side by side with continuations, and even revivals, of deep religious fervour. We shall even see that religious movements have played their part in inducing "materialist" attitudes. A fortiori, though both "rolled-up materialist" and "anti-religious" forces will here be assigned significant roles in Western secularization, it remains true in the Western context that forces of both kinds are relevant merely as presuppositions of secularism, or even merely as probably conducive to it. They are not constitutive of it. Hence our insistence that the following paragraphs be understood as no more than a survey of factors contributing to the growth and consolidation of secularism in the West. 94. Op. cit. supra n. 10. 9S. See esp, id. 14 ff. 96. [d. II. If we are content, as some writers are, to treat "secularism," "the secular state," and "secularization" as three quite different concepts, Luthera's distinction may be a welcome solution to our whole conceptual dilemma. The present approach, however, is built upon an assumption that the "secular" limb of all three of the above concepts must have the same referent in each case. A. R. Blackshield 41 (i) We have suggested that religion as super-naturalism has a tendency to expand its principle so as to read religious significance and "spirit" into every aspect of the universe. But once its scope actually reaches allinclusiveness, it can thereafter only ~iminish. Unless some factor (which may of course. be religion itself) induces social stagnation, in which no cultural change whatever ensues, a totally spiritualized universe can only thereafter become progressively secularized-so that "thing-techniques" of knowing and behaving are progressively freed from religious implications, and given progressively greater scope. Comte's assumption that allinclusive animism is the initial stage of religion, so that the whole of human history is a process of steady secularization, is not only quite unsupported by the evidence, but is actually rendered improbable by such evidence as we have." But with that caveat, his summation on the present point remains brilliant. "Everything was God, except God himself; and from that moment forward, the number of gods steadily decreased.?" (ii) As long as the notion of retaliatory balance between wrongdoing and suffering, virtue and good fortune, can be maintained, the hold of religion over ethical convictions will tend to remain strong. Yet this is an \ area in which religion itself cannot stand still. The need for an ethical interpretation of the "meaning" of the distribution of fortunes ... increased with the growing rationality of conceptions of the world. As the religious and ethical reflections upon the world were increasingly rationalized, and primitive and magical notions were eliminated, the theodicy of suffering encountered increasing difficulties. Individually "undeserved" woe was all too frequent; not "good" but "bad" men succeeded.v? To this challenge "rational" religion "could produce ... only three .. , rationally satisfactory answers"; the Indian doctrine of karma, Zoroastrian dualism, and "the predestination decree of the deus abscondidusl'P" Yet predestination does not itself long satisfy a burgeoning sense of justice, nor Zoroastrian dualism that of rationality. "Even as late as 1906, a mere minority among a rather considerable number of proletarians gave as reasons for their disbelief in Christianity conclusions derived from modern 97. Though if, like Comte himself, we are tempted by the liaison dangereuse of analogy between individual and social development, we may find support for his version in the theories of gestalt psychology, which imputes to the mind of the newborn child a state of "massive and relatively undirected" emotional excitation in face of the whole universe. As the child grows this "global" excitation is differentiated into "selective, situationally-polarized excitements," with an increasing number of features of the environment being recognized as not proper foci of excitement .\1 all. See F. Perls, R.F. Hefferline, and P. Goodman, Gestalt Therapy (1951), esp. 95-96. 98. See Comte, op. et lac. cit. supra n. 43. 59. Weber, cit. supra n. 43, at 275. Cf. Comte, op, cit. supra n. 43, at 554. 100. Ibid. 42 Secularism and Social Control theories of natural sciences. The majority: .. referred to the 'injustice' of tbe order of this world."!" (iii) Quite generally, tbe gradual acquisition and entrenchment in Western society of what Julius Stone bas called "enclaves" of justice':" has 101. Id.275-76. 102. See J. Stone, Human Law and Human Justice (1965) 338·355; id., op, cit. supra n. 12, at 555, n. 24. In an unpublished discussion of April 20,1963, Stone explained: The "enclaves" of justice cannot be formulated in terms of ideas as distinct from concrete historical situations. In taking stock of the human situation, it is important to see what areas of dealings between man and man at the given time have settled down into a stable control by some norm that for the time being is acknowledged; to recognize what those areas are; to recognize that the hold we have on those areas first of all is shadowy at the edges. The right of labour to organise for the purposes of bargaining concerning the conditions of economic exchange (for example) is now so well established that it is within what we would call an enclave of justice. Nevertheless this enclave is very uncertain at the edges; we are having problems determining how far we ought to allow the collective power of the unions to impinge on the rights of workers by controlling access to the union for example. Hence the enclaves are not directives: they have a core, but no clear edges. Western societies have developed a capacity for handling the uncertainties of the periphery; somehow we struggle through them. But our hold on the enclaves is fragile-this is obvious when one remembers how one of the great societies from the point of view of human culture and civilisation and science completely lost not only the core of some of the settled enclaves, but the very core of all the enclaves, namely the respect for the physical integrity of the human being. Hence it is crucial for the survival of any aspiration to justice, that there be an awareness from generation to generation of what these enclaves are: of the fact that they have had to be struggled for, that they have constantly to be re-interpreted to our circumstances. Without attempting a definition of "enclave," it could be described as the institutionalisation of men's private ideas of what should be their relations to their fellows, or their private attitudes to their fellows. The enclaves themselves are not ideas; they are settled relationships, attitudes, ways of acting, of men to other men. Theorizings about justice... can be seen as an instrument, a vehicle, a device, for transmitting awareness of the enclaves that are for the moment held, from one generation to another. The enclaves as held are a product of the experience of living men and women. Such experience cannot be directly communicated; but it can be rationalised and parts of it can be caught, like the still of a moving scene, in some theory of justice. Theories of justice are emanations of the enclaves of justice for the time being. They serve to transmit to the next generation, they also serve to transfer or translate ~hat is assumed in the enclaves over the familiar areas of social life into new areas. J. Stone, as reported in J. P. Bryson (ed.), "The Enclaves of Justice" (Mimeographed Report on Discussion of Preliminary Working Paper No.1, 1963, The Australian Society of Legal..Philosophy). A. R. Blackshield 43 led to an increasing reluctance to be content with the inscrutable "divine justice" on which religious sanctions depend. It seems apparent that very considerable gains had been made in terms of human decency, that men had-rome to be animated by an increasing sensitivity to human pain and suffering. This significant and obscure development ... contributed most immediately and notably to the rise of religious toleration. It might be suggested, indeed, that the history of culture can in one sense be interpreted in terms of the rising and faIling curve of man's sensitivity to cruelty and of his reaction to needless suffering. There was in religious persecution a very considerable and a very ugly psychological ana moral element which rr.ust be described as sadism. Innate barbarism relieved and justified itself by the infliction of suffering for what was conceived as a moral end..., The mass of men in England came to make a very sharp and important distinction between punishment imposed for the judicially demonstrable fact of crime and the infliction of punishment for the retention of opinion. This must be regarded as one of the most significant cultural gains in human history. These gains of the human race are painfully and slowly attained and they may be lost before the mass of men realize that they are threatened. Brutality and sadism are deeply rooted in man's nature. They are restrained by no surer sanction than a decent attitude toward the fact of difference, which man's biological nature apparently teaches him to abhor but which his history has taught him he must respect in the interest of sheer survivapo3 (iv) In particular, Stone suggests the acceptance in Western societies of an enclave of justice which is of vital relevance here. This is that "the adjustment or shifting of advantages and burdens (including rewards and punishments) for purposes of social control through law, should proceed in terms of the goods and evils of this world only."?" Prime importance is attached to the recognition that in the Earthly City justice requires law, even though it cannot be wholly replaced by law ... We are not entitled to excuse (as many if not most earlier ages have done) the continuance of human injustice. by flourishing the blandishments of the Heavenly City ... Justice is a function of material as well as psychologtcal and spiritual well-being, and of concrete opportunity as well as abstract liberty. John Cogley has recently affirmed, from the viewpoint of natural law, that "even its most ardent proponents do not hold that observance of natural law will produce the Kingdom of God. Natural law, rather, is directed towards making a decent place of the city of man by bringing moral order to the human communities found on earth."I05 103. W. K. Jordan, 4 The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1940) 476-77. 104. Stone, work first cited supra n. 102, at 341. 105. [d. 342. The quotation is from J. Cogley, Introduction to id. (ed.), Natural Law and Modern Society (1963) at 27-28. On the historica I emergence and influence of these humanitarian values on the basis of "secularized" natural law, see Groethuysen, Encyc. Soc. Sc, article cited supra n. 15, at 632, 634; J. Bowle, Western Political Thought (1947) 376·398; Bury, op. cit. supra n. 85, at 101ff. And see esp, as to the crucial role of John Locke, R. H. Cox, "Justice as the Basis of Political Order in Locke" (1963) 6 Nomos 243. 44 Secularism and Social Control (I') Underlying the factors so far discussed is a basic paradox to whic~Max Weber drew attention. The general result of the modern focrn of thoroughly rationalizing the conception of the world and of the way of life, theoretically and practically, in a purposive manner, has been that religion has been shifted into the realm of the irrationaJ. ... The irrational elements in the rationalization of reality have been the loci to which the irrepressible quest of intellectualism for the possession of supernatural values has been compelled to retreat. That is the more so the more denuded of irrationality the world appears to be. The unity of the primitive image of the world, in which everything was concrete magic, has tended to split into rational cognition and mastery of nature, on the one hand, and into "mystic" experiences, on the other. The inexpressible contents of such experiences remain the only possible "beyond," ... an incorporeal and metaphysical realm in which individuals intimately possess the holy. Where this conclusion has been drawn without any residue, the individual can pursue his quest for salvation only as an individual. This phenomenon appears in some form, with progressive intellectualist rationalism, wherever men have ventured to rationalize the image of the world as being a cosmos governed by impersonal rules. Naturally it has occurred most strongly among religions and religious ethics which have been quite strongly determined by genteel strata of intellectuals devoted to the purely cognitive comprehension of the world and of its "meaning." This was the case with Asiatic and, above all, Indian world religions. For all of them, contemplation became the supreme and ultimate religious value accessible to man,l06 The point that "rational" religion fosters the emergence of individualism calls for further elaboration (and some qualification) in the succeeding paragraphs. The further paradoxes introduced by the "rationalism" of Indian religions will be explored in section VI. We are here concerned only with Weber's main point, that religious "rationalism" leads ineluctably to a stress on religious "irrationalism," and so to confinement of religion to concern with the "other-worldly." At this point, at least for the West, is undeniable for alI its paradox. Not only is religion confined (as it were) to islands of irrationality in a sea of rationalism, but those islands tend to be visited less and less frequently, and less and less urgently. Not only (in our present terms) is the spread of religion in terms of interests affected [question (17)] drastically curtailed, but even in the areas that remain to it, its rating in terms of importance to society, actual influence, and emotional commitment [questions (I 8), (19) and (20)} is increasingly lowered as man's "capacity for critical analysis" increases.v" 106. Weber, cit. supra n. 43, at 281-82. 107. Cf. Carrington, op, cit. supra n. 3, at 197. Probably this is not what is meant by Cornte's generalization iop, cit. supra n. 43, at 550) that "perfect realization" of the "civilizing faculty" of religion presupposes its "intellectual decline;" and conversely "that its greater intellectual extension is coincident with its smaller social influence." In his context, indeed, those phrases are quite puzzling. A. R. Blackshield 45 The fact that in Christian history the "irrationalization of religion" reaches a peak in late medieval scholasticism-e-the pinnacle of theological rationality-simply underlines the paradox. The scholastic distinction between faith and knowledge calved out preemptive space for a theology based on revelation, but also asserted the possibility of a philosophical theology of thetruths perceptible by the human reason-including not only all physical knowledge but metaphysical knowledge of God. Aquinas, "by interpreting reason as merely the preliminary to faith, minimized the antagonism between rational knowledge and revelation." But the more radical contention of Duns Scotus and Ockham that all doctrines of faith are permeated with contradictions which the reason is incapable of accepting 108 led to the conclusion that reason can operate only in the realm of verifiable experience and not in the supernatural world. In the eyes of the nominalists therefore a line of demarcation had to be drawn between the sphere of knowledge accessible to the human reason and the sphere of faith posited on ecclesiastical authority. It was no longer a question, as in the case of Aquinas, of a difference in degree as between natural and revealed theology but of a difference in kind as between theology and science. The distinction between faith and knowledge was given a new and even stronger emphasis by the Protestant reformer Luther, who, in accordance with his conception of faith as an immediate relation between the individual seeker after salvation and God as revealed in Christ, rigidly excluded from the religious experience all knowledge, even of supernatural matters, and all metaphysical rational knowledge of God,109 (vi) The above passage returns us again to the point that Western civilization, partly under the influence of "rationalized" religion itself, has shown over the centuries an increasingly central concern with the intellectual and spiritual liberty of the individual human being. The relaxation of religious control which this entails is obvious. The Englishman's attitude ... now is that a man's religion is his private affair; he may think of another man's religion that it is right or wrong, true or untrue, but not that it is good or bad. In earlier times that was not so; a man was denied the right to practise what was thought of as heresy, and heresy was thought of as destructive of society.uo The growth of the religious toleration is of course a product of, as well as a factor in, a great many of the interrelated trends which I here enumerate; but Western individualism is one important contributing factor. And this individualism is also bound up with the trends to ethical sensitivity and 'earthly" justice already mentioned with the humanist exaltation of man that gave birth to such trends in the Renaissance, and with the practical materialism presently to be discussed. 108. See Stone, work first cited supra n. 102, at 55-60. 109. Groethuysen, Encyc, Soc. Sc. article cit. supra n. 15, at 631, qO. Devlin, op. cit. supra n, 9, at ~, . 46 Secularism and Socia! Control (vii) There is a further insight of Weber's, however, which seems paradoxically at odd, with the stress on individualism; and this again, like his point about rationality, contains a further, internal, paradox. Just as the rationalization of religion seems to strengthen religious control but in fact operated in the long run in the West to weaken this, so too with institutionalization. That this trend militates against individualism is obvious enough;'!' but what Weber now adds is that this anti-individualism may itself foster secularization. For the contemplative, otber-worldy, "passive" type of religion which tends not to be secularized is dependent for its operation On the private pursuit of religious transcendence by what Weber calls "virtuosos" of religion. "'Virtuoso' religiosity is opposed to mass religiosity;'?" and conversely the institutionalized authority of a "church" fights principally against all virtuoso-religion and against its autonomous development. For the church, being the holder of institutionalized grace, seeks to organize the religiosity of the masses and to put its own officially monopolized and mediated sacred values in the place of the autonomous and religious status qualifications of the religious virtuosos. By its nature, that is, according to the interest-situation of its officeholders, the church must be "democratic" in the sense of making the sacred values generally accessible. This means that the church stands for a universalism of grace and for the ethical sufficiency of all those who are enrolled under its institutional authority,l13 To see secularism as facilitated by the exclusion of "virtuosos" may still seem somewhat strained.'!' But church "democratization" may also support secularization-and even, after all, individualization-in a way which is more substantial, though longer in coming. In the clear-cut distinction within religious institutions between priestly hierarchy and laity, lay incompetence and ignorance in spiritual matters is at first taken for granted. In some instances, notably the ancient Maya religion of the central Americas, the increasing esotericism of the institutionalized faith has built up "extreme authoritarianism" of an inner band of initiates whose interpretation could not be questioned by ordinary men," leading in the short run to a high degree of social stability under firm religious control, but in the long run to moral, intellectual, and social decay ... and, in the case of the Mayas, to the collapse of the whole civilization.P" But in Ill. Thus Bury op. cit. supra n, 85, at 15, points out that in ancient Greece, traditionally the "home" of Western freedom of thought, such freedom was made possible by "the absence of sacerdotalism. The priests of the temples never became powerful castes, tyrannizing over the community in their own interests and able to silence voices raised af,amst religious beliefs." 112. Weber, op , cit. supra n. 43, at 287. 113. Id. 288. 114. Though Weber's point was anticipated by David Hurne, Essays: Moral , Political and Literary (1882) 145 fl', And see on its fuller significance infra at nn. 205-210. lIS. Carrington, op. cit. supra n. 3, at 255-56. A. R. Blackshield 47 European Christendom such extreme results of the distinction between priesthood and laity were forestalled until in the sixteenth century that distinction was completely transforrned.v" The Protestant Reformation,'!" by eliminating esoteric accumulations of dogma and restricting church doctrine to theBible, rendered the entire body of doctrine accessible to the layman, at toe same time eliminating priestly monopoly of the sacraments.!" At first this may seem like a de-institutionalization of Protestant Christianity: and on this basis the hypothesis has sometimes been ventured that Protestant religious zeal, at first fiery, soon became dissipated into religious indifference for want of purposive control.!" The 116. The history of the preceding five centuries was indeed one of a constant, never-quite-crystallized backing and advancing towards the clear emergence of the laity which the Reformation finally brought about. For a brilliant survey of these medieval trends as embodied in the so-called mendicant brotherhoods, and notably the Franciscan order, see A. von Harnack, Monasticism: Its Ideals and History and The Confessions of St. Augustine (1901) 81-116. V. H. H. Green, Renaissance and Reformation (1952) 1I1ff., rightly sees the Protestant movement as essentially a continuation of these older trends. 117. In those countries where Roman Catholicism remained the dominant form of Christianity, the long-forestalled movement to secularization within the Church institution found a less easy and in the long run a more traumatic fruition. The Catholic church persisted in its refusal to accept a set of doctrines which would be as intelligible to the amateur as to the carefully trained priest; the body of explicit dogma might be whittled away, but that far larger body of implicit dogma which must be received on the authority of the church was held to be sacrosanct. Under the circumstances the only alternative for the Catholic layman who sought some form of individual self-expression was to transfer his questionings and activities to a sphere in which the church had no jurisdiction. In France, for example, the layman first sought through movements such as Jansenism "to create a more vital role for himself inside a church which was committed to a policy of ignoring him," but failing in this transferred his activity to the social and political realm. And since the Catholic church had denied him any part in theological matters, he was determined that the forces of clericalism should be rigidly excluded from participation in secular affairs .... [T'[his worldly, antitheological, anticlerical point of view coincided with the rise of the middle class. The cultured bourgeois, unable to find a place for himself as a layman in the church and resenting the partiality shown by the ecclesiastical heirarchy to the clerical expounder of doctrine, broke away from the church altogether and became a prime mover in the increasingly radical attacks on the other-worldliness of the traditional theologians. Groethuysen, Encyc, Soc. Sc, article cited supra n. 15, at 633-34. 118. /d. 632·33 ; cf'. Max Weber, "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism," in Gerth and Mills, op. cit. supra n. 43, 302 at 317. And on the linkage with individualism see id. 321. The above analysis picks out only a few' main strands in the complex and contradictory impact of Protestant sectarianism. For a fuller analysis, with many additional insights also here relevant, see the classic statement in E. Troeltsch, 1 The So rial Teaching of the Christian Churches (transl. O. Wyon, 1931) 331-343. H9. See Hume, op. cit. supra n. 114, at 148-150. 48 Secularism and Social Control deeper analysis is rather that In Protestant countries ... there developed a new type of layman, who strove to carryover the Old Testament doctrines which he had absorbed as a member of the religious community into the everyday world where he moved as citizen and member of the social community. At the outset this process of identifying the ideals of the social and religious communities retarded the spread of secularism. Soon, lr,:,wever, as a result of the bitter struggles between the various sects and confessions it became imperative to discover certain basic elements of social control on which all citizens, whatever their ecclesiastical affiliation, could agree. 120 (viii) The bitterness of sectarian struggle was, of course, a main practical factor leading to the growth of religious toleration, and to the secular "separation" of Church and State.'>' So long as Western Europe could be identified with "Christendom," with religious unity underlying and reduplicating political unity in a massive overall feudal "commonwealth of Christian men, working in a harmonious hierarchy under God,"1Z2 the overlapping and intermingling of Church and State controls could be tolerated and, indeed, desired. The stability of "the feudal archetype of order through a firm social hierarchy" was dependent on Christianity.'!" Yet once religious unity was shattered by the proliferation of Reformed and Protestant sects, legal-political reliance on religion was not only stripped of its efficaciousness as an inducement to social stability and order, but became rather a constant provocation and aggravation of disorder and disruption. Aggrieved minorities and zealous orthodoxies were equally led to senseless and incontinent controversy, and even to bloodshed. "Every historian who has catalogued the historical factors which made for religious liberty and separation of church and state ... would doubtless agree that these institutions came into being under the pressure of their necessity for the public peace. "124 "The convincing fact of religious diversity imposed a spiritual necessity of religious liberty quite as persuasively as it suggested the political necessity for the legal toleration of orderly dissent"!" Moreover, the social interests and spiritual interests thus tending to tolerance and to secularization were powerfully reinforced by individual interests of substance. "A many-sided business community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if each of these elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and ... in 120. Groethuysen, article cited supra n. 15. at 633. 121. See generally Bury, op, cit. supra n. 85, at 72-100. 122. Bowie, op. cit. supra n, 105, at 194. The whole of Bowle's Book Two (pp. 145-244) is a capital study of the shifting relations between religious and legal-political controls from the dj\wn of the Middle Ages to their decline. 123. Stone, work first cited supra n. 102, at 4~. And see infra n. 145. 124. J. C. Murray, S. J., We Hold These Trlllhs (1960) 58. ct. Lurhera, op. cit, supra n. to, at 20·21. 125. Jordan,"4 op, cit. supra n, 103, at 482, A. R. Blackshield 49 that age the same thing to pursue its own religion."126 "Persecution and discrimination were as bad for business affairs as they were for the affairs of the sOUl."127 (ix) The religious fragmentation of the old feudal unity was of course a late stage in the break-up of feudalism, and was interwoven with many other factors contributing to this break-up.!" Perhaps chief among these was the growth of thriving international commerce, which sent waves of worldliness, mobility, and habituation to change rippling through the stagnation of feudal society. All these factors militated against the fixation of religious control. While the States were fighting one another, trade found out and levelled the road that lead from one nation to another, and established between them a relation of exchange of goods and ideas; a pathfinder in the wilderness, a herald of peace, a torchbearer of culture. 129 No doubt it is easy to romanticize the extent to which the merchants and tradesmen of the later Middle Ages were consciously moving away from feudalism to new social patterns of economic individualism.P'' Yet the rise of international commerce, and of intra-national regrouping around commercial towns, certainly had this effect. Not only were worldly, materialist "business" concerns increasingly recognized as worthwhile,'!' and technologies developed for the spread of new ideas and for the layman's sharing of old ones,132 but the whole traditional culture was permeated by a new "open texture." On the one hand, economic individualism leads to moral independence as well; economic laissez-fair e fosters culturallaissez-faire. 133 The more adept the members of the middle class became in regulating their lives according to fixed principles and the more they were made aware by their daily experiences in the economic realm that they could rely upon their own foresight, the less they felt moved to turn to the church for guidance or support. The traditional idea of an otherworldly sphere, over which the church exercised a divinely ordained monopoly, 126. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) 205. 127. Murray, op. cit. supra n. 124, at 59. 128. See Green, op, cit. supra n, 116, at 18-24 and passim; Bowl e, loco cit. supra n.122. 129. Rudolf von Ihering, Law as a Means to an End (transl. I. Husik, 1913) 175. 130. See, e. g., C. E. Ayres, Toward a Reasonable Socicty: The Values of Industrial Civilization (1961) 1'12-73. 131. See Green, op, cit. supra n. 116, at 23. 132. The contribution of technology, and especially of the printing press, to Western secularism and materialism, is a main theme of Ayres, ('p. cl ', supra n, 130. See esp. id, 177-183, 1%-206,277-79. 133. ~ee id, 45·47. Secularism and Social Control 50 was gradually robbed of the bulk of its significance.iss On the other hand, When a man is acquainted only with the habits of his own country, they seem so much a matter of course that he ascribes them to nature, but when he travels abroad and finds totally different habits ani standards of conduct prevailing, he begins to understand the power of custom; and learns that morality and religion are matters of latitude. This discovery tends to weaken authority.... 135 (x) In section II animism was defined as "the spiritualization of materiality," and fetishism as "the materialization of spirituality." An important strand in the interrelation of factors giving rise to the modern "secular" culture of the West was the realization that spirituality and materiality are not in fact to be identified in either of these ways. In other words, "thing-techniques" as distinct from "person-techniques" have come to be seen as the rational way of relating human activity to the physical world. The development and sophistication of such techniques have increasingly preoccupied Western man; and in this preoccupation he has come to insist on dispensing with the limitations and the confusions that spiritualization involves. In this development trade and technology have both 'played their part; but the factor of fundamental importance has been the rise of science-"the increasingly pronounced divergence between religion, which sought to cut free from the confusion of rationalistic speculation, and scientific inquiry, which felt the necessity of discarding fideistic presuppositions."136 The whole scientific movement grew up within the "pattern of compartmentalization"137 between knowledge as the realm of reason, and religion as the realm of faith, whose origins in scholastic theology have already been noted. The scholars and philosophers of the Renaissance brought new strength and sophistication to the separation of these realms, and "their indefatigable interest in the manifold phenomena of the immediate world of nature and of man served to dim the prestige of theological otherworldliness 'and fideism." Finally, in the seventeenth century, The comprehensive metaphysical systems of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz represented the first sustained attempt to construct a rational picture of the universe on the basis of scientifically established knowledge. In perpetuating and amplifying this type of inquiry the eighteenth century gradually shifted the emphasis of secularism from explanation in metaphysical terms of universal ultimates to a more empiric and intensive quest of knowledge in its concrete practical :manifestations. 138 ·~-----r Groethuysen, Encyc. Soc. Sc. article cited supra n. 15, at 634. Bury, op, cit. supra n. 85, at 17 (as to ancient Greece). Groethuysen, article cited at 631. Ayres, op, cit. supra n, 130, at 43. 138. Groethuysen, article cited at 631. And cf, the citations supra n, 105. 134. 135. 136. 137. A. R. Blackshield 51 Certain undesirable effects of this sharp compartmentalization will be referred to in section V. Yet It may be true that such a scient ific-technological revolution as the last five centuries have witnessed could have come about in no other way. If the political ,and ecclesiastical authorities of feudal Europe had somehow been able to realize what was going to happen to their world in consequence of the innovations by which they were so vaguely troubled, it seems most likely that every trace of every novelty would have been obliterated, and that Europe would have been sealed off from penetration by such foreign influences as the Arabic numerals and Chinese block printing, just as Islam was actually sealed off from those "graven mages" and China from all the tricks of the "outer barbarians." Indeed, it may be that the wonder is not that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake but that Copernicus and Galileo were not. The compartmentalization of Western culture may indeed be the price at which alone Western civiliza tion could have been won.l 39 (xi) Some religions may permit (and even encourage) secularization much more than others; it might even be possible to construct a typology of religions arranged in gradations of receptiveness to secularism. The overwhelmingly dominant religion of Western civilization has been Christianity, which would be drawn towards the "pro· secular" reaches of such a typology by at least two factors. First, Christianity is self-proclaimedly an "other-worldly" religion, confining itself by its own teaching to concerns which do not impinge on or detract from those of political governance of this world. The "separation of powers doctrine" with which our present hypothesis equates secularism is itself a Christian doctrine. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."140 As John Bowle has sharply observed, this "does not sound, on the face of it, a socially subversive attitude; it is in making the distinction at all that the political sting of the remark lies." Social control had hitherto been universally a matter for spiritual and political synthesis; "to separate the religious and social spheres is to strike at the roots of this position."141 Second, moreover, the demands that Christianity makes are squarely addressed to this world: Christ exemplifies what Weber calls "the emissary type of prophecy," as distinct from "exemplary prophecy" which "points out the path to salvation by exemplary Jiving, usually by a contemplative and apathetic-ecstatic life."142 Weber hypothesized that where God is 139. Ayres, op, cit. 44. 140. Mark 13. 7. The interpretation of this text is the subject of an unpublished thesis by my friend R.C.L. Moffat, under the title, What is Caesar's? (thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Laws, University of Sydney). Its significance in the present context is well discussed by Luthera, op, cit. supra n. 10, at 15-17. 141. Op. cit. supra n. 105, at 106. 142. Weber, cit. supra n. 43, at 285. 52 Secularism and Social Control conceived as an active Being, His prophecy will be of the active, "emissary" type, and believers will thereby also be led to active, affirmative exertion in the terrestrial world. Where on the other hand God is conceived as "a supreme and static being," as in Indian and Chinese religions, prophets and believers will be led to similar passivity and negativism with regard to the affairs of this world.':" Christian "freedom" is "in spite of all vacillation, not only a freedom of the individual/rom the world, but the freedom of Christendom for the service of God in the world."lH So that in the West the believing Christian is simultaneously encouraged to respect the competence in its own field of legal-political social control, and to busy himself with active interest in his "worldly" affairs.>" (xii) The influence of this latter limb of pro-secular Christian teaching has been seen in several of the preceding paragraphs. It was exhaustively studied by Weber himself whose best-known work showed now active Christian concern in worldly busy-ness found its logical conclusion in the rise of capitalism in the wake of the Protestant Reforrnation.!" Perhaps, however, a word should be added as to the later political-philosophical development of the former limb-the recognition of "what is Caesar's" as an autonomous realm-as this was combined by medieval scholasticism with the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy of the state. It was by means of this combination of "indigenous" Christian doctrine with "alien" Greek ideas, that the "rationalism" so triumphantly exemplified by Aquinas was able to move Christian thought away from the traditional Augustinian view of the state as at best a negative institution, to acceptance of the contrary view. This was that the state in itself is an institution of positive value, entrusted with the functions of perpetuating in this world the social conditions for attainment of salvation in the next.r" Thereafter, 143. [d. 285-86. 144. Von Harnack, op, cit. supra n. 116, at 82-83. And see id, 82-110 passim for a remarkable study of the working-out in the later Middle Ages of the Christian ambivalence between "worldliness" and "other-worldliness." 145. At first. of course, this tendency leads to theocratic rather than secular aspirations. See Bury, op: cit. supra n. 85, at 37-53: Bowle, op, cit. supra n. 105, at 196-203. The latter work, at 109-115, encounters some difficulty in explaining this development because the author takes Christian "other-worldliness" too much at face value. The fact is, of course, that the very frustrations of worldly aspirations by mediaeval theocracy ultimately contributed greatly to the secular trend. See Green, op, cit. supra n. 116, at 19-22. 146. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capit alism (transl. T. Parsons, 1930). C/ id., essay cited supra n. 118, p as iim; and id., essay cited supra n. 43, at 29J. And see G. O'Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (1923); R.H. Tawxey, op. cit. supra n. 126; V.H.H. Green, "Religion and the Riseof Capitalism," printed as Appendix I to id.,op. cit. supra n. 116, at 393-401, and other literature there cited. 147. Groethuysen, Encyc, Soc. Sc. article cited supra n. 15, at 631-32. And see Bowle,op. cit. s/1pra n, 105, at 204-210; T. Gilby, Principality and Polity (1958). A. R. Blackshleld ~s autonomous national sovereignty burgeoned, it bolstered by the ramifications of this philosophy. 53 was progressively In the later stages of the protracted contest between imperium and sacerdotiumg number of secularly minded thinkers, like Dante, formulated the thesis that the temporal ruler was entitled to exercise power in his own right.. .. 1J8 The Renaissance marked a distinct stage in the direction of secularism while the Reformation tended to perpetuate older ecclesiastical and otherworldly attitudes. While Machiavelli and his numerous disciples emphasized the duty of the pr.nce to rule independently according to his own canons, luther advocated the subordination of temporal institutions to the religious, and Calvin, drawing upon Old Testament models, succeeded in reesta blishing a theocratic type of government. The seventeenth century in turn was predominantly secularistic... (due mainly to) the revival and systematic elaboration of stoic natural law by Althusius, Grotius and Hobbes. According to the new rationalistic interpretation, which proceeded from more or less universalistic premises regarding the nature of man, the essence and function of the state is determined... by its own inherent characteristics and aims. Thus in place of the older doctrines of a universal mediaeval empire existing as counterpart to the universal church, there emerged the conception of an independent, sovereign state. The universally valid laws of nature are utilized by the state in the pursuit of its own particular aims .... Therefore these national objectives are the crucial determinants in the actual application of rational political principles, in the sense that these principles undergo modification in the process of adaptation to the genius of a particular political system. This new approach eventuated, with Montesquieu, in a type of political relativism which in striking contrast to the theological claims to absolute and universal truth declared that political maxims are valid only in so far as they take account of shifting and changing local variations.t rs IV. CAN THE "SEPARATION OF POWERS" HYPOTHESIS BE SUSTAINED? It is clear that out of this confluence of factors in Western civilization there has emerged a social aspiration to "secularism" in roughly the sense here hypothesized. Men generally in Western societies do believe that the state and its law should be free from the influence of particular religious institutions and beliefs, and should be concerned with goals of public order, material welfare and social utility, rather than with spiritual salvation. They do believe that the pursuit and transmission of knowledge should be independent of religious control, and should be indeed a fully autonomous field of social activity, whose only controls are values of scholarship and wisdom, and the fearless pursuit of truth. And they do also believe that neither legal nor educative institutions should denigrate -, 148. Cf. generally as to these developments Bowle, op, cit. supra D. 105, at 231309, and esp. as to Dante 233-36. And (f. even within the scholastic tradition the remarkable fourteenth century formulations of Marsilio of Padua, on whom see id. 236·241; Green, op. cit. 23. 149. Groethuysen, article cited at 632. 54 Secularism and Social Control ,. from religion, but should leave religious institutions free to flourish in the spiritual realm, and indeed should act where necessary to ensure this freedom. In a vague, impressionistic unfocused way, secularism as a "separation of powers" in the field of social control is an established ideal, or topoS;150 of Western civilization; and vagueness and lack of focus are after all characteristic of topoi. Yet if we want to ask how far these secularist ideals have been attained in Western (or Eastern) civilization as a matter of sociological fact, or even how far we think such ideals ought to be attained, vagueness and lack of focus will not do. In order to put concrete meaning into our "separation" hypothesis, we found it necessary at the threshold to seek a general understanding of the nature of the field of social control which is to be apportioned; and to attempt a more precise characterization of each of the controls amongst which the apportionment of functions is to be made. In both these endeavours we were able to make use of twentyfour questions concerning what is to be apportioned; can we also make use of these same questions in trying to say how the apportionment is to be made? There is one way in which all twenty-four questions might potentially be relevant. Question (2), as to concrete applicability, may serve as an example. An examination of this question in relation to social controls generally might show that while there is a need for social controls with a high degree of concrete applicability, there is also a need for vaguer, more flexible, more generalized controls; so that placement of various controls along this spectrum might be one way of allocating to each its "appropriate" kind of contribution to overall control. If, for instance, we find that law is characterized by the specific, immediate applicability of the norms which it provides, then even though we recognize that such norms need to be complemented by (and even based upon) more generalized "ideas" or "principles" or "values," we might want to conclude that law should keep out of the attempt to provide these, and should be content when it needs such generalities to draw on other social controls. But as a matter of fact I myself would not want to say this; this kind of division of functions seems to bring confusion rather than clarity. In turn, therefore, to certain limited groups of our twenty-four questions whose significance for control "separation" is more direct, and perhaps more reliable. These directly relevant questions fall into two groups. One group centres on questions (16), (17) and (21): over how many people, over pursuit of what interests, and with the aid of what range of sanctidns, does the particular control exert its power? 150. For the notion of "tcpoi" as here employed see J. Stone, Legal System and Lawyers' Reasonings (1964) 327 If., esp. 333-35; J. Tammelo, "The Law of Nations and the Rhetorical Tradition of Legal Reasoning' (1964) 13 Ind. Y.B. Int. Affairs 227, at 235 ff., esp. 242-45. . A. R. Blackshield 55 In the attempt to assign a social control to a particular role and keep it there, anyone of the questions may be decisive. The fact that a particular control by its nature is capable of wielding only certain limited sanctions, may be an excellent reason for assigning to it a correspondingly limited share of the interests to be affected. But, at any rate for law, religion and education, the more probable situation is just the converse: the sanctions al1~cated to these means of control will depend on the range and nature of the interests respectively affected. Again, with controls dependent on particular social groups (the archetype here being the family) the natural limitation of control to the members of the particular group in each case is usually determinative of the place of the group among social controls generally. The range of interests to be affected, and the allocation of sanctions, will become largely secondary matters, "naturally" determined by reference to the limited numbers of persons involved. Insofar as law, religion and education may by institutionalization or exclusiveness become specially associated with specific sub-groups of the society, this kind of calculation may be relevant to allocation of their roles in overall social control; but again it cannot be determinative. For law, religion and education are all at least potentially applicable not to isolated social sub-groups, but to the all-inclusive social group as a whole. Accordingly the primary allocation of competence amongst them must be by reference to the interests to be affected. We might say, for example, as to religion that however all-inclusive its primal social ambit, and despite all the caveats in section II (d), religious forces have now become distinctively concerned with the pursuit of "other-worldly" interests, with the attainment of "salvation," "redemption" bhakti, or "grace" through non-material means. On a similar basis of cultural "compartmentalization" (we might add) education must be distinctively concerned with the pursuit of truth, the discovery of knowledge, and its transmission to future generations. And similarly, law must be concerned with the pursuit of justice and regularity in relations between man and man, and with the pursuit of peace, order and social stability as conducive to these ends. Within the respective spheres thus specified, each is to be supreme and autonomous, free from interference and even supervision by the others. Yet this kind of "separation of powers" amongst law, religion, and education flies counter to every implication of our survey of these forces as social controls in section II above. In the first place, we saw that in the historical development of social controls, specific controls-are not characterized by specific functions in the way just postulated. The above allocations of functions can at best represent analytical rationalizations made late in the historical process. In the second place, our sketches of law education 56 Secularism and Social Control and religion in their function as social controls have surely displayed at least one common tendency. It is a tendency which may indeed be common to all social controls, or at any to those Which become specifically institutionailzed. This is that once 'a particular social phenomenon gains a foothold in social control through recognized competence to control human behaviour with regard to certain objects, or in certain fields of activity, its influence and competence-at least in aspiration-will tend to expand until they "cover the field" of social control. Law, religion and education-and, for that matter, morality, economic competition, the family, and group and personal influences general1y-do not keep making to their alloca ted roles in the fabric of social control, but work to further or frustrate each other in a thousand ways. They overlap, reduplicate and compete with each other in a constant ongoing interactive process.P' And if we think that in Western nations this all-inclusive involvement is even more true oflaw than of religion or education, that is only because we believe that law has established itself/or the time being as the dominant social control. This idea that one social control can be "dominant" over others directs us to the second group of our twenty-four questions which seems special1y relevant to the present view of secularism. This group brings together those questions touching on the relationship amongst social controls inter se: questions (10), (13), (23) and (24), as to external limitation, norm-transmission, independence, and "control of controls." In the light of these questions, the difficulties already encountered with the "separation of powers" notion final1y become crystallized in the following ways. (i) Even if the wielders of competing social controls aspire to independence of each other, they do not and cannot aspire to total freedom from mutual influence. We may insist that the state and law be not subservient to religion; but the men wielding powers of state and law (not to mention the subjects to whose lives the law must be tailored) are frequently religious men, and their norm-creation and norm-application must inevitably be Shaped by religious norms. Conversely religion may 151. The continued involvement of all social controls with law is a main theme of Stone, op. cit. supra n. 12, esp. at 746-49; on the continued involvement of all with education see J.K. Hart, A Social Interpretation of Education (1929) 247 if. And see G. Santayana, "Liberalism and Culture," in id., Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922); T. Parsons""Propaganda and Social Control," in id., Essays in Sociological Theory (revised ed. 1954) 142, at 143 if. But for fears that even the organic "system of interdependent structures and processes" of which Parsons there speaks i~ too systematic a model to be usefnl, see Stone, op, cit. 16 ff., esp, 27-28~ A. R. Blackshield 57 demand to be independent of state control and state interference; but it must still live and move within a law-state, and its norms must be shaped accordingly.v" In other words, asocial control can have a high place on the "independence" spectrnm [question (23)], and yet also have a high 'place on the, "external limitation" spectrum [question (10)]. If our "separation" hypothesis involves denial of these truths, that hypothesis cannot be sustained. (ii) Even if we can allocate specific functions and subject-matters to specific social controls, certain functions connected with social control transcend "all such allocations. One of these functions is perhaps that of social control itself; another is the transmission of norms. This may, as we have seen, be peculiarly associated with education; but it is also of central importance to religion. Ritualization and "sacralization" are vital techniques for ensuring the continuity of social norms through generations. Even law-making itself may be seen in one aspect as simply a technique for projecting our present norms into future generations. Apart from this overlapping of functions, there may be overlap in the need for functions; and here, too, norm-transmission offers apt examples. Demands are frequently heard in Western countries for educational institutions to include in their curricula some introduction to the community's rules of law; and from the religious side for a similar introduction to religion. 153 If educational institutions were ever to establish a true monopoly of "the transmission of culture" (as our "separation" hypothesis might seem to suggest), these pressures would obviously be enormously increased. But, of course, we have only to conceive of such a monopoly to see that it is really inconceivable. (iii) In fact, when we spell out the exact implications of the "separation of powers" hypothesis, we see that it commits us to several propositions which are simply nonsensical. Certainly it makes sense to say that law shall be free from religion; that religion shall be free from law; perhaps that education shall be free from religion; and possibly even that religion shall be free from education (in the sense that education shall not be used to instil anti-religious ideas). But it is difficult to see what it means to say that education shall be free from law; and one shudders to think what it might mean to say that law shall be free from education! (iv) Even if the "separation of powers" model could be made meaningful, this could only be on the basis of a major sociological inquiry on the lines which section II of this essay has barely sketched. The fact that the "separation" model requires us to carry such unmanageable 152. This, too, is a main theme of the Jines of thought proceeding from Aquinas. See the citations supra n. 147. 153. See infra n. 177. 58 Secularism and Social Control impediments on our excursion into the study of secularism does not of course mean that the model is false. But it does mean that it is too cumbersome to be a cognitively useful model. (v) It ought in any case to be clear that we cannot really discuss secularism in terms of only the three social controls of la'iv, religion and education. Once we think of a carving-up of the field of social control amongst particular competing controls, there is no justification for picking out three controls for special attention: all social controls must be brought into the picture. This, after all, merely reflects COmmon usage of the notion of "secularism." We may speak of the secular approach to marriage, for example, meaning that the family as a social institution should not be controlled by the fact that it happens to be a religious institution. Again, we can speak of a secular ethics, meaning a set of ethical values whose content is not dictated by religious ideas. Secularism can then be "defined" only by providing a matrix form, "Secularism is the attempt to establish an autonomous sphere of .... purged of supernatural, fideistic presuppositions,"154 the blank being filled in with the appropriate objective in each case. 155 (vi) The very analogy which our use of the term "separation of powers" imports, should warn us of the dangers that come from conceptual attachment to such notions.!" Even if we can in an impressionistic way allot specific functions to specific social controls, we should recognize that what is involved is likely to be a matter of mutual checking and mutual adjustment rather than mutual independence.l'" that any division of functions on the basis of efficiency, influence, and possession of the facilities for the control, must shift and change as the rating of particular controls in these regards waxes and wanes; and that to attempt to freeze the functional adjustment at any given moment into conceptual separation may simply frustrate vital functions altogether.t" "We must .... be careful when we recognise the process of complex and mobile adjustment underlying democratic stability, not to assume that the adjustment as it appears at any particular time is the only one that could have come about, or that it is not vulnerable to disturbance.v'F" (vii) If notwithstanding we do approach the relations between law, religion and education in terms of conceptual separation, this would seem 154. I here follow the form of Groethuysen's definition in relation to the pursuit of knowledge, quoted supra at n, 15. 155. Sed quo How would such a matrix be used to define "the secular view of marriage? " .. 156. See Stone, op. cit. supra n. 12, at 653-56, 696-98. 702-03. 157. C/. as to separation of powers stricto sensu id. 618. 158. C/. similarly id. 655-56,697. 159. ld. 631.~ A. R. Blackshield 59 to imply that all three of them should indeed be totally independent of each other; and this may very well accord with the aspirations of each. Yet this would also correlatively entail that all three of them, at least vis-a-vis each other, should be totally deprived of "control of controls" : if each is to have a "total:' rating on the independence spectrum, each must have a "zero" rating on the "control of controls" spectrum. V. P. Luthera, indeed, is led by' a priori adherence to the "separation" hypothesis-to insist both that in a genuinely secular state the law should not carry its prohibitions of caste discrimination into the pre-emptively religious sphere of admission to worship in temples, and that the Temple Entry Authorization Acts, which have done precisely this, are therefore major proof of his thesis that India does not conform to the "concept" of the secular state. The state can, of course, consistently with the concept ban the practice of untouchability... from non-religious places such as restaurants. hotels, sarais, musafirkhanas, rivers, streams, springs, wells, tanks. cisterns, water-taps, bathing ghats, roads and passages. But can it consistently with the concept, ban untouchability from religious places? Can it throw open the religious institutions.... to persons to whom these institutions are closed according to the tenets of their religion ...1160 Clearly, on Luthera's separatist conception of the secular state, and on our own parallel hypothesis as to secularism generally, the answer to this question must be "No." Yet in social reality-not to mention social justice-the answer must just as clearly be "Yes." In the complex interactive process glimpsed in the preceding pages, no social control can ever be totally independent of others, nor totally debarred from the power to direct the operation of those others. Luthera's thesis seeks to place religion in the former of these impossible positions, and the state and law in t~ latter. The very fact that temple entry authorization is inconsistent with the "separation of powers" model of secularism, ought to suggest that the "separation of powers" model must be wrong. (viii) Even if we can allocate specific functions and subject-matters to specific social controls, situations will still arise to be regulated which seem to fall within the domain of two or more controls. Again, the problem of temple entry for untouchables is a nice example. We might say that entry to temples for the purposes of worship is a matter peculiarly within the religious realm; or we might say that a matter so personally precious is a peculiarly vital matter of social discrimination. In such a clash between a religious interest and an interest of social ordering, there must be some way of determining which of the competing controls may . prevail. The issue may, of course, be left to the outcome of un patterned 160. Luthera, op. cit. supra n. 10, at 106-07, where the relevant statutes are collected. And see generally id. 102-09. 60 Secularism and Social Control social flux; or we might want to resolve it ad ho: in each' case, depending On which of the competing interests in title of which control is sought is more "important to society" [question (18) ),16 1 But we might also want overall arbitral function to some to resolve it by allocating a kind particular social control, even if it be one of the controls "involved in the particular contest. And regardless of what we want, the jostling for supremacy among social' controls is likely to mean that, in any given society at any given time, this last device will usually be the one in fact in play. One indisputable meaning of Western secularism is that over the centuries Western societies have resolved that this overall arbitral role shall faJl to law - or, at any rate, that it shall not fall to religion. And, of course, even if we opt for ad hoc adjustment according to the importance of the interests involved, the outcome will be the same. For the question of what interests are important to society is itself allocated to law (or at any rate, not to religion). at (ix) Even apart from such situations "affected with a double interest," the very idea of apportioning functions of social control according to subject-matter involves a need for some mechanism to make the apportionment. Again, this may be unpatterned social flux or ad hoc determination but in modern "planned" or "rational" societies it will in fact involve allocation of "the say" to some dominant social control. In short, "social control" includes the function of regulative oversight and adjustment of the working and of the interlocking of particular social controls; and planned social control involves the idea that this function be allocated (at any rate predominantly) to some particular control which at a pinch prevails over the rest. Even this dominant control will not have total independence nor total "control of controls;" but it will rank significantly higher on these spectrums than any other control. (x) On this basis, we may finally venture a definition of secularism as evolved in the West which is more modest than our original hypothesis, but also less troublesome. Secularism, we may now say, is that approach to social control which insists that any other social control viewed vis-a-vis 161. This kind of determination might itself go in either of two ways. If we feel strongly enough that (e.g.) eradication of untouchability is important to society, we might allow the merest colourable connection with that interest to bring the matter within the field of social action. Alternatively we might also want to test the strength of the subject-matter's relevance to the competing interests, so that even if we deemed anti-discrimination more important than religion, a matter vitally connected with religion and only incidental to caste might be left to the religious control. We might also want to take int", account the probable consequences of legal action or otherwise. Thus Luthera supports his argument against the temple entry laws by arguing that the desired reform would in any case be brought about by voluntary religious action (up. cit. 108.09). In view of the controversy with which Ow Acts were received (see id. 107, n. 1) this seems rath!r sanguine. A. R. Black shield 61 religion shall rank high on the independence spectrum [question (23)]. Or, correlatively, and more simply still, it is that approach to social control which insists that religion shall not attain a significant place on the "controls" spectrum [question (24)]. It will be noted that this definition does not depend on any particular characterization of religion (nor a fortiori of''any other controls) in terms of some "central concern" or "essential interest" or "primal motivation" or otherwise. It does not require an illusory "total independence" from religion, nor any degree of independence of religion itself at all. And while it suggests an obvious likelihood of causal connection of secularism with "rolled-up materialism," antireligiousness, and religious indifference, it does not identify it with any of these. It says simply that in modern societies, religion shall not be the "control of controls."162 V. SOME CONTINUING PRACTICAL PROBLEMS IN THE WEST It follows from our picture of social control as an ongoing process of "complex and mobile adjustment" that the balance struck between religion and law, or religion and education, will be subject to stress, fluctuation and controversy at any given moment. Most of the current areas of difficulty are well known. The most spectacular problems arise from the attempt at complete separation of church and state in the United States;':" as to these, it need only be said that on our present conclusions (and pace Justice Black) the whole enterprise seems misco nceived.l'" For, first, it requires us to strike down social arrangements which are perfectly harmless in the light of the basic objectives of secularism itself. (This, surely, was the position in the School Prayer Case),165 Second, conversely, a literalist "separation" is at least in theory impotent to strike down social 162. Even this modest and flexible definition would have certain dogmatic consequences. One is that the function of deciding what mar ters can be allotted to what controls at any particular time should never itself be allotted to religion; for this function is one vital aspect of "control of controls." So that however it be as to temple entry, the Indian Supreme Court's experiments with "auto-determination" by religious institutions of what matters are "religious," do seem inconsistent with secularism. See, e.g., in the context of temple entry itself Venkataramana Devaru v. State of Mysore (1958) S.C.R. 895, at 908-09, applying a dictum of Mukherjea, J., in Hindu Religious Endowments Commissioner (Madras) v. Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar (1954) S C,R. 1005, at 1025. 163. On the earlier cases see M. de Wolfe Howe, Cases on Church and State in the U.S. (1953); D.R. Manwaring, Render unto Caesar (196~). On Engel v. Vitale (1961) 370 U.S, 421, concerning (non-denominational) prayers in state schools, see E.N. Griswold, "Absolute is in the Dark" (1963) ls Utah L. Rev. 167; Stone, op. cit. supra n. 12, at 226, and other literature there cited. And see for related problems P.H. Odegard (ed.), Religion and Politics (America's Politics Series, No. I, 1960); W.G. Torpey, Judicial Doctrines of Religious Rights in America (1949). 164. It is interesting that in the U.S. context Professor Luthera shows considerabe sensitivity to the untenability of strict separatism. See op, cit. supra n. 10, at 50-52. 165. Engel v, Vital ,supra n. 163. 62 Secularism and Social Control arrangements which are socially harmful in terms of the basic objectives of secularism. (The "inconsistency" argument against the Temple Entry Acts yields an Indian illustration of this danger.) Third, the attempt at strict separation overlooks the ubiquity of religion, its pervasiveness in social patterns and institutions.l'" And fourth, its inflexibility seems strangely at odds with accepted canons of constitutional "interpretation.167 But most of the continuing problems in the West are more limited, and more peripheral. The secularism of Western legal systems is well established; difficulty mainly arises as to how far such secular systems can and should be used to nurture the validity of religious institutions in their own sphere.!" Should blasphemy be subject to censorship, or to punishment as a crime?169 Should religious institutions command special privileges as to municipal rates and zoning laws,':" or under the law of charitable trusts?l7l Or conversely, should law extend its legitimizing approbation to trusts for anti-religious purposes.r" or to testamentary conditions plainly based on sectarian intolerance?"! Similarly as between religion and education, it is now well established in British countries that the principal educational institutions shall be state-owned, non-denominational, "secular" schools. But does this mean that denominational, privately-owned schools shall be abolished, as mooted in England a few years ago ?17J Or that they shall be held to strict 166. This of course would apply a fortiori in the Indian context: see infra § VI. 167. Cj. Chief Justice Marshall's famous manifesto in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) 4 Wheat. 316,407. This argument may also apply a fortiori in India. Secularism is perhaps expressly embodied in the U,S. First Amendment; and in that event, while it still demands a broad and flexible "constitutional" construction quite transcending legalistic conceptualism, it is obviously held down somewhat to legalist formulation. But it might be said that in the Indian Constitution, secularism is not expressly incorporated at all, but is simply "secreted in the interstices" of articles 25-28. We might even say (as in the U.S. Justice Douglas might: see Griswold v . Connecticut (1965) 85 Sup, Ct. 1678, 1681) that "zones" of secularism "emanate" from the "penumbra" of those articles. The flexibility then arising must transcend even what Marshall envisaged. The dicta of Kania, C.l., in A.K. Gop alan v. State of Madras (1950) S.C.R. 88, at 120, abjuring reliance on "a spirit supposed to pervade the Constitution but not expressed in words" are of course of contrary tenor. 168. Materials on various aspects of the problem are collected in Simpson and Stone, 2 op, cit. supra n. 73, at 975-1007. And see Stone, op, cit. supra n. 12, at 333-36. 169. See the charming old New York case of People v. Ruggles (18H) 5 Am. Dec. 335, reprinted in part in Simpson and Stone, 2 op, cit. 978·982; and more recently Burstyn v, Wilson (1952) 343 U.S. 495. 170. See J.E. Curry, Public Regulation of the Religious Use of Land (1964). 171. Gilmour v, Coats (1949) A.C. 426; Congregational Union of New South Wales v. Thlstlethwayte (1952) 87 C.L.R. 375. 172. Bowman v, Secular Society (1917) A.C. 406, esp, Lord Sumner at 464 1f. 173. Church Property Trustees v. Ebbeck (1960) 104 C.L.R. 394. 174. See A.~. Gilkes, Independent Education: In Defence of the Public Schools (1957). A. R. Blackshield 63 financial independence, with no claim to "state aid"?!7 5 Does it mean that in the state-owned schools there be no religious instruction ?176 Or that there shall be "general religious teaching as distinct from dogmatical or polemical theology?"!" Running ihrough these particular issues are certain important themes touching the fundamental relations of law, education and religion as social controls. As to law and religion, it is argued, religion remains an indispensable source of social cohesion and stability. Law must remain 175. This issue remains hotly controversial in both Australia and the U.S. For a survey of the arguments in the latter country see J.K. Norton, "Church, State and Education" (1949) 38 Journal of the National Education Association 21-24. 176. This of course is the solution adopted in India by article 28 of the Constitution. On the arguments for and against the provision see M. V. Pylee, op, cit. supra n. 10, at 260-61. 177. N.S.W. Public Instruction Act, 1880, § 7, repeating an earlier provision of 1866. On the background history prior to 1866 see W.J. Relton, "The Defeat of Denominationalism in N.S.W. Education" (1963) 7 Aust, J.E::!. 122. The 1866 provision was introduced in Parliament by Sir Henry Parkes, who said: It W,iS never intended by the Government, by the term secular instruction, to exclude such religious knowledge as was common to a Christian people. (Loud cheers.) He frankly admitted that the wording of the Bill, which said that secular instruction exclusively should be given, might be fairly taken to mean that; but certainly, after this candid admission, he hoped th rt he should have credit given to him when he declared that it was never the intention of the framers of this Bill to exclude such a knowledge of the Bible as all divisions of the Christian Church must possess, or a knowledge of the great truths of Revelation. (Hear, hear.) Well, then, we intended at the proper time to introduce a clause to make this plain beyond all doubt. The Sydney Morning Herald, October 4, 1866. The Act also provides (§ 18) for "special religious instruction" in denominational groups (for which the appropriate clergymen are to visit the school) for "a portion of each day not more than one hour." In practice the convenience of schoolteachers and clergy alike has reduced this to one hour per week. In a recent highly controversial revision of the teaching syllabus prescribed under the Act, the N.S.W. Department of Education has further watered down "general religious teaching" by transferring this substantially into the framework of the social studies curriculum, where the religious teaching becomes a kind of simplified introduction to comparative religion, in which simple stories concerning good men of all religions are offered as exemplars of social ethics. Criticism has come mainly from (i) Christians, who maintain that in a Christian country secular education should offer "an awar~ness and understanding of the place of Christianity in the cultural heritage of the community of which he forms a part," "an intelligent understanding of the scriptual background to and the basic teaching of the Christian faith," and "a knowledge of the moral and ethical teachings of Christianty;" (ii) rationalist libertarian groups, who see the new syllabus as "reminiscent of the Dark Ages, because it binds secular ,-~achers to propagate sectarian religious views," and as "socially disruptive, because of the discrimination it causes;" (Iii) Jewish spokesmen, who object to the inclusion of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection as stories in social studies ; (iv) teachers, who findthemselves required to bring much unfamiliar material into an already overcrowded syllabus, 64 Secularism and Social Control distinct from rclig.on, but it must also cherish religion, or risk the destruction of society itseif; Religious morality "is built into the house in which we nve and could not be removed without bringing it down."!" In particular, it is said, religion is the basis of the institution of marriageI 79 and however it be as to more obviously secular matters, the law of marriage and divorce must remain firmly rooted in its thedlogical basis.P? Oddly, Lord Devlin in this overall plea for common law implementation of Christianity, urges a "clean break" in the field of divorce: "the mingling of the spiritual and the temporal jurisdictions has been good for neither. "181 But whatever the outcome, the tension between the religious and secular approaches to divorce is a major contemporary strain upon Western legal systems.!" In relation to religion and education such arguments assume even wider implications.l'" Western civilization, it is widely thought, has become preoccupied with material things. The worldly busy-ness which allowed Western man to escape from theocratic stagnation has established a sterile and misplaced "theology" of its own. The result has been an Umwertung aile Werte, a devaluation of values; cultural relativism and religious agnosticism have led to a moral agnosticism as well. Instability, confusion and anomie have replaced our moral certitudes. We need to restore ourselves and society to a sound grasp on values.P' And since materialism and normlessness (as we have seen) have been so closely bound up with secularism, the answer must lie in a reversal of the secularist trend. Science and technology must be reintegrated with values and with religion.V" 178. Devlin, op, cit. supra n. 9, at 9. And see id. passim for a cogent and moderate statement of this kind of view. Many natural law writings might of course also be vouched. 179. See id. 9-10,61-85; but (f. infra at n. 181. 180. See, e.g., P.A. Ryan and D. Granfield, Domestic Relations: Chi! and Canon Law (1963) 258-59, 317·325. 181. Devlin, op . cit. 84-85. 182. See the Report of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, 19521955 (Morton Commission) (Cmd. 9678, 1956) esp. paras. 34-71; Slone, op. cit. supra n. 12, at 303-315. For a striking Australian example of direct conflict between religious and secular approaches see Macrae v. Macrae (1964) 6 F.L.R. 224, discussed in Stone, o». cit. 311-312, n. 154a. 183. The issue is seen in its pure form in the United States, whc reas in India education is at present completely secular. See the invaluable collection of materials in Stanley et al. op. cit. supra n. 28. at 332·374, esp. the passages from A.S. Nash (The University and the Modern World (1964) 252·261, 262, 287-288,291) at 345·349. 184. See gene~~lly Stanley et al., op, cit. 375-451; Stone, op, cit. supra n. 12, at 154-!63. 185. This kind of view is expressed from the viewpoint of industrial technology itselfin Ayres, op . cit. supra n. 130, passim; and from the viewpoint of scientific evolutionism in Carrington op, cit. supra n. 3, esp, at 275-283, 300·307. A. R. Blackshield 65 No doubt crassness and acquisitiveness are all too evident in Western society. And there is also much moral anomie, though this in particular is often exaggerated. But we have here seen that secularism, far from being the cause of materialism and normlesness, has rather been a by-product of these. And on the t whole it has been a valuable byproduct. No doubt we need to improve our "person-techniques" as well as our "thing-techniques," and perhaps even to learn again to integrate the two. But "person-techniques" are not really "spirit-techniques;" and though a spontaneous revival of religious fervour might bring a new strong sense of values, a flight from secularism by elevating religion over law or education would by no means necessarily do so. Nor, in any case, is a sense of values always desirable in itself. The important point is always rather, What are the values sensed? VI. SOME SPECIAL PROBLEMS FOR DEMOCRATIC INDIA The conceptual, cognitive, practical and political problems which have here been seen to shift and twist within the Western notion of secularism, and the impossibility of bringing all of these into one order of reason even as a preliminary basis for discussion, must certainly daunt any simple ideological commitment to "secularism" as a clear standard for action. If nevertheless such a standard remains accepted and even cherished in Western societies, it is because in a cultural climate of diverse religious sectarianism coupled with general religious tolerance (and much religious indifference as well), of passions for liberty and for truth, of empiricism, pragmatism, institutional specialization, and the seeking (and substantial achievement) of a fair minimum of material standards of living for ali, even religious intellectuals can take it for granted that the search for justice and for truth should not be fettered by dogma; and even non-intellectuals can take it for granted that the jobs of law, government and schooling should be got on with without undue religious intrusion. The complexities and problems here reviewed simply do not reach these basic assumptions. Another way of saying this is that the presuppositions of "secularism"-the values and attitudes embodied in "rolled-up materialism "-are well established in the West. If in peripheral areas the implications of "secularism"-in the sense of no religious "control of controls"-have still to be finally sorted out, and so for the time being remain open to ideological debate, nevertheless the "rolled-up materialist" foundations for the debate are taken for granted on both sides. Yet in India the position is different. Socio-economic justice-the equal distribution of minimum standards of individual life-is the most urgent and the most crucial goal of all modern Indian development; but it is not an established reality. Even as a goal, it seems not to be fully shared (or at any rate not fully heartfelt) by the whole of Indian society, 66 Secularism and Social Control but to be accepted as an object of striving only by a small intellectual minority, influenced by Western ideals. Even among this minority, the valuing of socio-economic justice is often not accompanied by a similar positive valuing of economic individualism as the means of achieving the goal: and the acceptance of "indIvidualism" in the wider sense of the libertarian-utilitarian tradition is even more uncertain. .Even among the intellectual minority, the aspiration to socio-economic justice tends to be inhibited by a yearn ing to cling to the values of the great Indian past. Industrialization is mistrusted as deeply as it is sought after; and even scientific minds are in some respects ambivalent in their attitudes towards science. In short, the "rolled-Up materialism" into which I have here lumped the cultural pre-suppositions of secularism in the West, is not a consolidated achievement in India, but only a goal for future progress: and even as a goal it is rather uncertainly held. It is against this background that the Indian search for concrete practical ways of implementing "secularism," and even for conceptualization of the mea' ing of "secularism," has to be conducted. And against this background, a disconcerting conclusion seems unavoidable. This essay has insisted throughout that "secularism" in the West somehow has to be understood as a formal, relational concept, describing the adjustment between religion and other forms of social control. At first we tried tentatively to describe this adjustment in terms of a "separation of powers" between law, religion and education; later we shifted to the less rigorous notion that the adjustment must be such that religion is not a "control of controls." Throughout, the objective was to find some description of the secular adjustment which would enable us to keep secularism conceptually distinct from "rolled-up materialism." But the fact that must now be faced is that at least in the Indian context, this hankering after COnceptual clarity cannot be satisfied: "secularism" in India must refer to the full cluster of "rolled-up materialist" aspirations and attitudes, in all their amorphous complexity.P" We have seen tbat even in the West a full study of the growth and consolidation of secularism might lead to such a conclusion. We might have to say tbat pragmatism, religious tolerance, socio-economic justice, adaptability to change, and the like, were not merely historically linked with the wane of religion as a "control of controls," but were so intimately 186. The original version of this essay as presented for discussion was insufficiently on guard against the dangerous assumption that the meaning of the word "secularism" must be the same in any culture. This led to doubts whether "secularism" (no religious "control of condoIs") could be significant or even relevant in tackling the important social problems of India. I would now see those doubts as a further reason why in Indian discussion the concept should be given a meaning which really does have such relevance. A. R. Blackshield 67 and inseparably linked with it that they cannot be conceptually distinguished. For my part I would still resist such a conclusion for the West, insisting that ordinary language-institutions associated with the usage of "secularism" in Western language cultures do confine it to relational propositions about religion as a social control. But by the very same test, it is equally clear that '"Secularism" in Indian usage cannot be so confined. In Indian parlance "s-ecularism" is a broad, all-inclusive ideological symbol, in which all the aspirations of "rolled-up materialism" are in fact summed up.187 Furthermore, this is an ideological symbol of such powerful popular appeal-in an area where powerful ideologizing is still so direly neededthat even if we thought conceptually that "secularism" could be limited to exclude the rolled-up materialist aspirations, we might have to conclude that we ought not so to limit it. For to do so would be to throwaway a powerful emotive weapon in a struggle for social progress where we need all the weapons we can find. If the equation of "secularism" with "rolled-up materialism" did not exist in the Indian mind, it might be necessary to invent it. Yet, though "secularism" may be a powerful symbol in the Indian struggle for progress, it is not an unambiguous one. It is still subject to all the complexities, dubieties, problems and ambiguities which have here been reviewed: and in the Indian cultural setting new complexities, dubieties, problems and ambiguities rise cumulatively on all the rest. The fact is that the three preceding paragraphs beg some rather crucial questions which it should rather be the function of the present volume to pose, and where possible to answer. Is secularism already achieved in India, either as a result of Western importations or independently of these? Does Indian culture offer receptive soil for its transplantation? Is the transplantation even desirable at India's present stage of social development? Is it possible at all ? Above all, the answers to such questions turn on certain basic ambivalences within the mighty synthesis of the Hindu tradition. The philosophical virtue of synthesis may well be overall truth; but its philosophical defect is that on particular questions, the synthesis may well point both ways. The questions to which I now finally come are all relevant to Indian secularism and respectively to this; but in which direction this relevance points is a matter on which often the devout Hindu, 187. Perhaps this is part of the synthesizing tendency in Indian thought, presently to be mentioned. The usage of "independence" iswarajv often shows an identical tendency. So the Indian Vice-President, Dr. Zakir Husain, points out that for the late Prime Minister Nehru "independence was not a formal negative stait of absence of foreign domination, but had a positive content of social justice and full economic development." (Memorial Address at Jawahar Bharathi College, Kavali, November 14, 1965). If we substitutevsecularism" and "religious" for "independence" and "foreign," the present point emerges exactly. 68 Secularism and Social Control and a fortiorl the non-Hindu, must hesitate to speak. From this poiat onwards, even more than before, this essay ventures into the realm of the conceptually unmanageable. It seeks to pose questions, and also counter questions; to state opposite assertions both of which are usually tenable. Even where I seem to speak dogmatically, my propositions must be understood as open to refutatrcn, and sometimes as containing their own refutation. Only this can be said without refutation: that the areas I shall point to are areas where clarity must somehow or other be found. (i) Syncretism or Fragmentation? Many of the problems to be mentioned arise from the very nature of the Hindu synthesis itself. "Secularism" in the Western sense is simply one aspect of the fragmentation of social institutions which has characterized Western history -the steady tendency to isolation and precisation of separate fields of human desire and human endeavour, and the cultural proliferation and adaptation of specialized social institutions or groups for each separate field. In traditional Indian culture this institutional fragmentation seems to be lacking. "Just where the line can be appropriately drawn between Hindu religious belief, practice, and feeling as such, on the one hand, and the intermeshing evaluative conduct constituting the structure of Hindu castes, guilds, village councils, and similar loyalty-eliciting groups on the other, baffles the most thoroughly informed students of such matters." 188 The very notion of differentiation amongst social controls seems alien to Hindu tradition. It is true that the all-inclusive caste system itself is in one aspect an unparalleled example of the specialization of social functions; and the sharp distinction of artha and dharma in one aspect, as we shall see, carries secularism to the extreme point of "separation of powers." Yet functional specialization in Indian society remains always related to, and rooted in wider linkages and loyalties which persistently channel specialization back into themselves. The idea of being a scientist, or a teacher, or a lawyer, or an administrator, in a way that concentrates single-minded attention on the objective job thus designated-divorced from and if need be overriding the loyalties of caste, joint family, religious community, and even personal friendship-is an idea that still too often seems alien to the Indian mind. All loyalties, all duties, all mora lities, all social functions, are woven together in a mystical whole; and the whole is saturated with religion. In the i.nterweaving of this whole lies nothing than the problem of India. Indian philosophy, and Indian social structure, create endless distinctions and specializations with a thoroughness and fineness, a 188. Becker, op. cit. supra n, 4, at 145. A. R. Blackshield 69 patience and precision, that the Western mind cannot rival nor even comprehend. But whatever is thus put asunder is always welded together again, in a solid totality of interlocking layers so complex, so continuous in emotive experience, and so fundamentally spiritualized-and even "etherealized" -that distinctions and specializations, and the very discontinuities thpt "interlocking" entails, finally melt away. We are left with an impenetrable solidarity of social roles, beliefs, aspirations, and attitudes, which overlay each other and seal each other away from social change. This, indeed, is a deeper reason why the various aspirations which come together in "secularism" and "rolled-up materialism" cannot be separated from one another in Indian discussion, even if they can and should be kept apart in Western contexts. Precisely because the traditional Indian society is all of a piece, modern India's problems are also all of a piece. Economic, industrial, legal, political, religious, educational, agricultural, and social problems cannot be separated out for discussion, but must all be tackled at once.l'" for these, too are caught within the traditional welded unity. In the past, of course, this unity bore the world's oldest civilization to triumphant self-contained survival through unparalleled centuries. But in the modern world mere self-containedness, and even mere survival, are neither sufficient nor even possible for any nation. The twentieth century inexorably challenges all of us to progress, and to participation in a wider human destiny. In order for India to meet this challenge, and the lesser but still insistent challenge of the "Western" culture with which she must now also live, the traditional welded unity needs to be broken open. To the extent that it is broken open all of her problems can in time be solved; to the extent that the old welded closure remains, progress in any area can only be piecemeal and tenuous. To say this is but to emphasize the enormity of the problem. It is not to minimize the remarkable progress that has already been made since independence; still less to suggest that further progress is likely to be more difficult. Indeed, the same interlocking of problems that makes the task so overwhelming may well give us reason also to predict that progress will now continue at a steadily accelerating rate. For the nature of this welded interlocking is such that any progress in any area, however trivial when compared with the magnitude of the task, will tend to loosen the whole structure, and make further progress in other areas correspondingly easier. It is in this sense above all that the merger of all Indian 189. Within their interlocking the economic problems might seem so dominant as to call for primary-if not (for the time being) exclusive-s-attention. '~ut on the impossibility of abstracting economic growth from cultural growth in general, and on the temptations to totalitarianism if the economy is too obsessively stressed, see Stone, op. cit. supra n. 12, at 585-86, 768 (with special reference to the Indian problem), 70 Secularism and Social Control strivings in a "rolled-up materialist" notion of secularism is not merely confusing, as it might be in the West, but a realistic and practical response to the unique Indian problem. (ii) The Problem of Caste. In Hie tradiitonal welded unity of Indian society, the chief structural matrix and the chief cohesive bond has been the system of caste.l'" Correspondingly, the gravest social problem facing independent India has been that of caste discrimination. The involvement of the discrimination with the pervasive influence of religious social control seems quite unique. Members of a religious community here discriminate against others in the same religious community; and the same religion enjoins the ones to discriminate, and the others to submit. "Caste cannot be properly understood in isolation from Hinduism, for it is Hinduism that provides caste with its sanctions and gives to the whole system its moral meaning." 191 Yet within this religious structuring the caste system is also shaped by materialist and economic forces; and these forces can even effectuate social change within caste hierarchy.l'" At least in Howard Becker's terminology /93 caste involves "secular" as well as "sacred" elements; and some sociologists'!' suggest that the former may even be primary. If the caste system is itself already a secular social control, which the doctrine of varna merely reinforces, what then? Clearly the need to hold down caste structures to an insignificant place on the "control of controls" spectrum [question (24)] remains pressing in modern India;195 caste influence on state politics is good neither for politics nor even for caste.!" If indeed caste habits of communication and forms of cohesiveness can be used as a vehicle for formation of the interest-groups on which a pluralist, "secular" society depends for the voicing and even for the formation of demands, then to condemn such groups merely because they are nominately "castes" would to be fall prey to the most foolish kind of verbalism. As a matter of social reality reform 190. For a brief account from the standpoint of sociological jurisprudence see Stone, op. cit. supra n. 12. at 139-140. 191. R. Segal, The Crisis of India (Penguin Books, 1965) 35. 192. Insofar as this view is based on studies of caste flexibility in Ceylon, its application to India is questionable, but seems in fact valid. See A. M. Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (1950); Nur Yalman, "The Flexibility of Caste Principles in a Kandyan Community," in E. R. Leach (ed.), Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (Carnbridge'Papers in Social Anthropology, No.2, 1962) 78-112. Similar trends in South India are reported by K. Gough, "Caste in a Tanjore Village," in id, 11, at 55ff. 193. See supra at nn. 80-85. 194. See, e.lf., Srinivas, op. cit. supra n. 2, at 7-8, 42ff. And cf, Max Weber, "India: the Brahman and the Caste," in Gerth and Mills, op. cit. supra n. 43, at 396-415. 195. See Srinivas, op . cit. 15·41. 196. See Gough, cited supra n. 192, a 158-59. A. R. Blackshield 71 will then have been achieved. If on the other hand patterns of interest representation in fact perpetuate caste inhibitions of mobility, adaptability, and independence of outlook, then as a matter of social reality reform will still be needed; and to insist that caste has been legally abolished will equally be mere verbalism.P? In either case, it is clear that a "secularism" conceptually held down to a demand for independence of other social controls from religious controls, is simply not an adequate slogan to base the needed reforms. Only a "secularism" understood as "rolled-up materialism" can effectively undermine the caste-attitudes that linger on after caste control has been formally destroyed. Can this in fact be done by selectively building on secular ingredients within the caste ideology? Or does such a suggestion merely allow the old welded unity to close again, even as we break it open? (iii) Tolerance or Communal Strife? India's endless proliferation of religions, and of sects within religions, would seem to make the religious toleration which the West achieved only through secularism an urgent necessity. India has undergone partition for the sake of religious Communities; and the continued tension with Moslem Pakistan, and the continued presence of millions of Moslems within Indian society, would seem in the light of European history to threaten religious dissension of the most appalling kind. The religious riots that occur from time to time would seem to make good the threat. Yet on the whole the very spawning of sects and variations within Hinduism has led rather to a remarkable tolerance. Despite constant "temptations to religious fervour, indeed frenzy," India gently clings to the tradition of tolerance so fundamental to Hinduism. It is not merely that Hinduism does not recognize heresy, that a Hindu born remains a Hindu whatever he believes, but that Hindu society as a whole has historically displayed tolerance toward religious minorities. It is no accident that a community of sun-worshipping Parsees, originaIly from Persia, with strange-and to most Hindus probably repugnant-ways of disposing their dead, should have been permitted in peace to establish themselves as a prosperous communtity in India.... Tolerance is of the very material from which the Indian character is formed. 198 Does this mean that on this front, too, secularism can build on fore-echoes of the secular within the indigenous tradition? Does it even mean that on this front at least, secularism is not needed, or has even been established for centuries? Or should both these questions be resisted, 197. C! as to caste and trade unions Stone, op, cit. supra n. 1~~ at 339, n. 286: "A union disguised as a caste may be an admirable way ofmaking progress palatable; a caste disguised as a union can result only in regress sub rosa." 198. Segal, op. cit. supra n. 191, at 31-33. 72 Secularism and Social Control as tempting us to a comforting reliance on tradition, which may leave us unequipped to face contemporary problems? (iv) The Absence of Religious Institutions. We have seen that the institutionalization of religion in the \vest has played a complex and manysided role in the fluctuations of religion as a social, control. It may strengthen the power, the purposiveness, and the range of influence of the religious creed; it may cramp the potential influence of religion into sterile esotericism; it may sap the socio-religious influence of the individual, but it may also provide a womb from which individualism can emerge. In India none of these conflcting potentialities are open. The secularization of the state... presupposes... an organized religion. It presupposes a religion which has its own laws, its own courts to interpret these laws and to settle disputes, its own discipline, and its own hierarchy of officials to administer its affairs and to (ejffect religious reforms Hinduism is not organized and has no such mechanism of its own The state has, of necessity, to deal with questions relating to doctrinal interpretation, settlement of disputes, administration of religious institutions and the effecting of religious reforms. But the performance of such functions by the state cuts at the very root of the concept of the secular state.l 99 Yet the point is not really that India has no "religious institutions." It is rather that there "institutions" are either so limited and localized, or else so macroscopic, that Western models of religious institutionalization, and of its probable effect, can simply have no relevance to the Indian situation. On the one hand, the whole sub-continent teems with religious institutions. But these thousands of temples and endowments always represent only (as it were) ad hoc institutionalization - for a particular god, a particular relic, or a particular local variation of a particular sect or creed. There is no overall hierarchy, no "church," to knit these "institutions" together as a unified force for social action. (Does this make resistance to secularism weaker, or merely harder to pin down?) On the other hand, when we look at the welded Indian unity, we have to add that the reason why Hinduism and its offshoots have no organized "church" is that in a certain sense the whole of Indian society provides them with a religious "institution"-that the strength and range of influence, the repressiveness and the frame of reference for individual effort, which Western religion finds in churches and sectarian organizations, are here found in nothing less than society itself. Non-Hindu religions, and deviant forms of Hinduism, then gravitate to a readily tolerated but still subordinate place within the nooks and crannies of this overall "institution." What are the implications of this s~uation for secularism, for religious freedom, for religious equality, and for the vital ferment of individual questing for salvation '! 199. Luthera, op, cit. supra n, 10, at 147-48. A. R. Blackshield 73 (v) Tat Tram Asi, Intimately bound up with the emergence of Western secularism was the high Western valuing of, and preoccupation with, the human individual. Indian culture, too, is a "self-centred" culture; but here the self at the centre is the, all-inclusive and infinite atman. Here above all the Western mind encounters a baffling ambivalence in Hindu thought. Doer. Hinduism exalt the individual even more than the worldly West, or does it rather submerge the individual in contemplation of the infinite? Clearly, self-realization is seen as the highest aim of the life; yet the highest aim of life is not necessarily the realization of the highest personality, as usually understood .The question of personality and its development through integration is outside the scope of the problem of salvation as understood by Indian philosopher. .. .It may be said that the central aim of Indian philosophy is the discovery of the true nature of the "I," of the basis of the experience of the "1." The "I" is ultimately regarded as the inwardness of the physical body. It maintains itself through a process of inwardness, the "I" consciousness being the activity of this inwardization .... Indian ethical discipline may be interpreted in two ways; positively it is the realization of one's self (atman): negatively it is liquidation or complete surrender of the ego and its activities. 2oo Some European writers have suggested that confusion in this area effects Western rather than Indian thinking. For in our Occidental concept of the "soul" we have mixed up, on the one hand, elements that belong to the mutable sphere of the psyche (thoughts, emotions, and similar elements, of ego-consciousness), and on the other, what is beyond, behind, or above these: the indestructible ground of our existence, which is the anonymous Self (Self with a capital S; by no means the bounded ego), far aloof from the trials and history of the personality. This invisible source of life is not to be confused with the tangible ... gross body; neither with any of the various highly individualized faculties, states of reasoning, emotions, feelings, or perceptions that go to make up the subtle body. The true self iatman, brahman) is wrapped within, and oot to be confused with; all the "spiritual" and "material" stratifications of its perishable covering. 201 Yet the Indian grounding of the self in a universal Self seems often merely to restate the Western confusion as a deliberate confluence. And it then seems to strike echoes in such aggressively individualist outcroppings of Western thought as existentialism (for which the individual Existenz is to be rooted in Being),202 and even Kantianism (for which you 200. P. T. Raju, "The Concept of Man in Indian Thought," in id. (cd.), The Concept of Man (1960) 206, at 299-300, 301. And cf, id. 224-237. 201. H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (ed, J. Campbell, 1951) 78·80. And see id. 3-4 and passim. -. 202. See A. R. Blackshield, "The Importance of Being: Some Reflections on Existentialism in Relation to Law" (1965) 10 Natural Law Forum 67-145; and see K. Guru Dutt, Existentialism and Indian Thought (1960) esp, at 90-92.. 74 Secularism and Social Control are to "regard humanity in your own person as well as in the person of everybody else always as an end in itself, and never as a means only").203 The dilterence is that whereas these Western groundings of the unique in the universal seek to direct the universal outwards to seek expression through the unique, the parallel linkage in Indian thought seeks to direct the unique inwards into the universal. Here again, Western fragmentation confronts Indian synthesis., Individualism loses its secularizing role, and leads rather to a mystic merging of all social forces, if not to their abnegation. The individual is the focus of the philosopher's world. But he is "passive in relation to the world," in the sense "that all his activity leads to a reabsorption or involution instead of a creation or evolution.t'P'" Moreover, this whole ambivalence as to individualism is an ambivalence contained within a single strand of classical culture-the philosophical strand. In a certain sense this philosophical strand has succeeded over the centuries in escaping the confines of the "we lded unity" of Indian society. Louis Dumont has hypothesized that creative and elaborative philosophical thinking has always proceeded in Indian history from those religious "virtuosos" whom Weber saw as the Indian (and anti-secular) alternative to "institutionalized" religion.s'" For this kind of thinker, says Dumont.i'" individualism does have concrete and central reality; but this reality is achieved only by renouncing the world, and thereby breaking free from the welded social unity. Within that unity individuals "have no substance: they exist empirically, but they have no reality in thought, no Being.... On the level of life in the world the individual is not." Only the philosophy of the samnyasin, the renouncer, "conceives of the individual as being.r"?" But by committing himself to this conception, the samnyasin in a sense denies his own purpose, "finds himself invested with an individuality which he apparently finds uncomfortable since all his efforts tend to its extinction or its transcendence. "208 Hence the apparent philosophical contradictions with which we have just been struggling. Hence, moreover, both sides of such contradictions-both philosophical individualism, and its renunciation or submergence-are in opposition to the realities of life within the traditional society. But this is rarely likely to be a reformative or even practical opposition. In a certain sense, 203. Kant, Grundlegung der Met aphysik der Sitten (1785), transl, in T. K. Abbott, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and other Works on the Theory of Ethics (4 ed, 1889) 47. 204. L. Dumont, "World Renunciation in Indian Religions" (1960) 4 Contributions to Indian Soci%eY 33, at 56. 205. See supra at nn. 112-14. 206. Essay cited supra n. 204, at 43-51. 207. 42-43. 208. 46. u. u. A. R. Blackshield 75 the samnyasin in committing himself to individuality makes himself irrelevant to the social world. For the non-individuals within the world, goes on as before. The samnyasin, instead of functioning as a Trojan horse within the gates of the established order, has furnished it instead with a kind of "safety valve." The Brahmanic order has thereby been "able to give the transcendent a permanent place while remaining out of the range of its attacks. By means of this compromise the Brahman rules over the world in peace."209 An individualism emerging within a religious orthodoxy can (as we have seen) work to leaven the whole into secularism; but samnyasin individualism is neutralized from any such leavening role. Even when the samnyasin as guru preaches and teaches to "men-in-the-world"even when his preaching leads to new sects or (as with Buddha) new faiths-such teachings are neutralized, like the teacher, from touching the existing order. From the orthodox viewpoint, as we have seen, they are merely absorbed into the nooks and crannies of the whole society, which is India's "religious institution." From the sectarian viewpoint, the sect appears as a religion for the individual superimposed upon common religion, even if this latter is relativized to the point at which Brahmanism is viewed simply as the order, or disorder, of the day-to-day world. The caste order continues to be respected, even if it is seen, in the light of sectarian truth, as a profane concern.i.. Situated outside the world but linked to it, the renouncer is impotent against it; if he ventures in that direction his ideas become ephemeral.xt? Of course ideas cannot be wholly irrelevant to life in the world. Even though-and partly because-the samnyasin is not "in the world," his individualism, and his negation of it, are ideas which his physical presence inescapably symbolizes for those who remain there. These continually re-presented ideas are a focus for much of the idealizations, aspirations and half-yearnings, of even the most worldly Hindus. But even insofar as these ideals and aspirations do introduce a certain kind of individualism into day-to-day Hindu culture, it is still not the right kine! of individualism to playa secularizing role. Secularism depends upon an individualism in the world, an active individualism. It begins in Europe (as we have seen) with economic individualism. Indian individualism, as personified in the samnyisin and explored in his speculations, is an individualism renouncing the world, a passive individualism. It is not an economic but a philosophical force. Even this does not exhaust the puzzles to be solved. On this, as on all the matters here discussed, myraid false paths of romanticizing and mysticizing our view of Indian culture lure Indians and non-Indians alike. To see that the idealized universalism of Indian philosophy conceals a 209. Id. 52. 210. [d. 60-61. Secularism and Social Control 76 questing personalism may help us to avoid one false path; to realize that Indian philosophy is one thing, and daily life in Indian cities and villages another, avoids another which is far more treacherous. "Living India" is a different matter from" India in the books." Yet even when we think we are looking at living India, we may still•be seeing it through ideas derived from books. That "individualism" is absent from India's ~cial system so far as the study of culture can ,see it is indisputable. But it is also indisputable that Indians in their homes and at work, in city and village streets, are not the vaguely passive, "faceless" nonentities that our stress on nonindividualism might imply. No doubt many of them are. But many others-and not merely modernized, urbanized, "Westernized" Indiansare eager and alert, inquisitive and acquisitive, frank and curious, gay and self-assertive. In short, Indians are personalities. In an age of mass conformism, they remain among the least homogenized of peoples. Should this prompt us to forget philosophies and concentrate on the facts of life? Or should it prompt us merely to concede with Dumont that (obviously) the individual-in-the-world "exists empirically," while still insisting that culturally he "is not?" How far, in either case, can this merely de facto "individualism" be a foundation or even a foothold for a cultural secularism? (vi) Worldliness or Other-Worldliness? The doctrine of the four life stages and the four aims of life2I1 seems clearly secularist at its roots. The pursuits of material riches and worldly power (artha) and of sensory pleasure (kama) are not only recognized as worthwhile in their own right, but are even more sharply separated from ethical and spiritual limits than in the typical Western mind. Yet the ethico-religious adherence to dharma, and above all the contemplative search for (or sinking into) the spiritual release of moksa, seem to set off against this worldliness an insistent other-worldliness, which differs from Western "other-worldliness" in three crucial ways. Each of these must be considered at some length. (a) First, the unworldly is here not merely separated from the worldly, but is set above it as a transcendent concern in the light of which worldly concerns must fall away. Certainly, here as in Western secularism, there is a "complete differentiation between the spiritual and the temporal;" but in this case the differentiation "allows society, in relegating the temporal to a subordinate position, ... to found itself directly upon the absolute order."212 If this is a "separation of powers," it is one in which the spiritual powers still exert a "control of controls" with regard to the secular, and even (by virtue of their hierarchical transcendence) insistently suffuse the secular. Where the Christian distinction between (spiritual) good and <. 2[]' See Zimmer, op, cit. supra n. 201, at 34-42. 212. Dumont, essay cited supra n. 204, at 52. <0 · '. R. Blackshield 77 (worldly) evil would "condemn and exclude, India hierarchizes and includes."213 Yet this ultimately anti-secular reading of the four aims of life, for all its currency, is only one interpretation among others that are also available. The above reading depends on analogizing or even assimilating dharma to moksa, by reason of their dearness to one another on the hierarchy. "For the Hindu common sense, moksa and dharma are not felt as heterogeneous."214 Dharma, insofar as it is a law, is an ideal law having the same relation factually with positive law as our Natural Law. Since it is conformity with the order of the world, it is, at its deepest, that which becomes Natural Law when nature and convention are distinguished. "215 Yet by the same token, if we read downwards instead of upwards on the hierarchy, dharma might also be analogized or assimilated to artha. 216 It then becomes positive law as distinct from natural law.s'? comprising what is "posited" not only by wielders of kingly power, but by judicial exegesis and above alI by customary usage. Later in this volume Judge S. S. Dhavan, of the Allahabad High Court, will argue powerfully that in this sense dharma is essentially secular, even (indeed especially) in its classical manifestations.v" Among the most cogent factors he adduces to support this thesis are the early abandonment of mechanical-magical modesof proof in Hindu law; the overwhelming preoccupation of the ancient courts with commercial issues, debt-colIecting and the like;219 and above all the almost u. 213. 42, n. 14. 214. [d. 45, n. 19. 215. [d. 43, n. 16. 216. Indeed, a main theme of the essay by Dumont here referred to is that dharma, arrha, and kama form a homogeneous trilogy of distinctively "human ends," to which moksa is a later and extraneous addition. He sees this addition, indeed, as the master stroke by which Brahmanism neutralized the "virtuoso" renouncer. (See supra at nn. 209-210.) For this "masks the heterogeneity between the three legitimate and necessary worldly ends and the negation of the world which, although optional, is fatal to the other three once it is adopted." Similarly as to the four life stages, the intention seems to be "on the one hand to represent samnyasa merely as a moment in the life of the Brahman, reserving renunciation more or less to the Brahman class, and on the other hand to delay renunciation until the latest possible period of man's life, after his worldly obligations... have been accomplished. In short, over and above the habitual orthodox tendency to aggregate, there seems to be here an attempt to limit renunciation in its relation to worldly conditions and, finally, a subdued hostility to renunciation itself." (ld. 45). Some of his remarks already quoted (supra nn. 212-15) are of course inconsistent with this thesis; in a note at 43-46 he seems to regard this as a matter for concession and justification. Yet the inconsistency seems to be rather inherent in the data. 217. See Max Weber, Hinduismus lind Budd.iisntus (1923) 143. 218. S. S. Dhavan, "Secularism in Indian Jurisprudence," infra at 102. 219. This, however, might merely suggest that the ancjent law, by its very secularity and objectivity, was largely confined as an effective social instrument to merely commercial fields, secularism in "person-techniques" being socially unacceptable. For a parallel hypothesis as to modern Indian law see G. S. Sharma, "Horizons of Indian Legal Philosophy" (1962) 2 Jaipur L. J. 170, at 190. 78 Secularism and Social Control total absence of any "sacred" resistance to change, the ready creative responsiveness to shifting social needs which is "secularism" in Howard Beckerls sense.F" Yet he also insists, both as a matter of classical interpretation and as a passionate exhortation de lege praesenti et ferenda that even this "secular" dharma does not and must not countenance "individualism." We are returned to one of the central unsolved <jilemmas of the present essay: can "secularism" either in the Western sense (no religious "control of controls") or in" the Indian sense ("roBed··up materialism") be divorced from the concrete positive valuing of the human individual? (b) So far as these perplexities turn on the ambivalence of dharma, we can say that a similar ambivalence is also to be found in the Western concept of "law."221 When however we turn our attention to the second apparent consequence of Indian "other-worldliness," we are dealing with ambivalencies that are more distinctly Indian. The point here is that liberation from the world (moksa), which crowns the aims of life, is the converse side of a doctrine of endless involvement in the world. In Martin's terms,222 the Indian version of "other-worldliness" is one in which "progress" towards the "intrinsically worth-while state" is seen "in terms of several lives to come." This "progress," moreover, is by no means an automatic succession of modes of existence ever closer to an ultimate inevitable moksa. The ontic doctrine of samsara (successive reincarnation) is conditioned on a deontic doctrine of karma, by which the mode of each life is predetermined as retribution or reward for what was done in the previous life. The mode of life thus predetermined must be unquestioningly accepted, precisely because it is one's just reward. This is man's dharma, and the way to moksa is not to try to rise in the world-to arrogate to oneself some other man's dharma, some other man's lot-but to try to transcend oneself within the allocated role, and to transcend it first of all by accepting it and taking it unto oneself. These, above all, are the strands of belief that tie the individual existence into place in the cosmos-wide and eternity-wide "synthesis" of India. 220. See supra at nn, 80·85. For intriguing parallels, on all these points, with the Jewish legal tradition (the "secular" attitude there being achieved within the leeways of a theocracy), see H. Cohn, "Prolegomena to the Theory and History of Jewish Law" in R. A. Newman (ed.), Essays in Jurisprudence in Honour of Roscoe Pound (1962) 44. 221. Etymologically "dharma" (from dhri) , "lex" (from figare), and "ius" (from iuneerei all mean simply "that which is binding;" so that strictly perhaps the ambivalence between natural and positive law is rather a neutrality. The ambivalence between factual and normative connotations, (and also the suggestion that a man's dharma is peculiarly his, in thezense that it originates in him) may be seen (only half-buried by usage) in a wide range of English words, including "valid," "proper," and "authentic." See my article cited supra n. 202. 222. See the passage ., quoted supra at n, 45 . A. R. Blackshie!d 79 Their implications for "secularism" a.re deeply troubling. First, we are here confronted with a web of religious belief which spreads out its religious control to cover the entire social system. How can this kind of "otherworldliness" be itself held in or "controlled" so as to leave free play to the worldly? Second, the ethico-religious duty here entailed, of acceptance of the inherited lot, not only affords no cultural room for the "secular" attitude of easy acceptance and even eager exertion for change, but marks this out as alien to what man's true dharma enjoins. Third. in particular, this ethico-religious duty has for centuries identified itself with support for the system of caste. Fourth, above all, this web of doctrine provides an almost unassailable rationalization of the injustice of this world. Rebellion against such injustice is to that extent not available as a prod to the movement away from religion; for this religion can explain all injustices with consistency and even with beauty. The Christian doctrine of predestination, for example, was never really consistent with the belief in divine love, and in human freedom of will; the doctrine of karma can accommodate both, and the mysteries of birth and death as well. On the other hand, here yet again, we find acceptance of worldly affairs, and of individuality in the world, emphasized on the very basis of "other-worldliness." Above all, as to individualism, we find here offered on a fully rational basis, ethical teachings which have been achieved in the West only on the basis of a "flight from rationalism'vwinto existentialismthat every individual is "thrown" into a unique "role," a unique mode of "being-in-the-world;" and that the path to authentic being lies in accepting what one is, in being what one is, and in a constant striving to transcend oneself from within one's place-in-the-world.w' (c) The exhortation to transcend one's being-in-the-world while yet accepting this, links with a final distinctive feature of Indian "other-worldliness." This is that whereas Christian unworldliness (as we have seen) may actually foster worldly busy-ness, the acquisition of things and of "thing-techniques," Indian unworldliness relegates all these to the realm of illusion and distraction.f" Wherever the sacred values and the redemptory means of a virtuoso religion bore a contemplative or orgiastic character, there has been no bridge between religion and the practical action of the workaday world. In such cases, the economy and all other action in the world has been considered religiously inferior, and no psychological motives for worldly action could be derived from the attitude cherished as the supreme value. In their innermost beings, contemplative and ecstatic religions have been rather specifically hostile to economic life. Mystic, orgiastic, and 223. See W. Barrett, Irrational Man (1961). 224. See the citations supra n. 202. 225. C[ Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and its Development (1951). 80 Secularism and Social Control ecstatic experiences are extraordinary psychic states; they lead away from everyday life and from all expedient conduct. 226 Wijhin the sphere of influence of Eastern religions generaIly, writes Richard Carrington in his rather Teilhardian study of the "evolution" of civilization."? a reasonably high level of material culture was achieved, but the urge towards its expansion was then lost through the influence '~f a myst.cal philosophy which held that no present disturbance of mind was ultimately worth while, as the purpose of man was to lose himself in the quietude of a harmony which intellectual effort could only destroy, This allowed the individual to support a degree of personal suffering and frustration that might otherwise have proved intolerable .. The consequences of this rejection of the world are incalculable.s" Not only is India turned away ab initio from the positive valuing of material possessions and activities, and even of human welfare, which has been so intimately associated with secularism in the West; but even the objective pursuit of knowledge becomes a matter which the thoughtful and earnest Hindu must often find it hard to take seriously. The whole "observed and manipulated world, as well as ... the mind itself"229 are identified with maya, illusory and unsubstantial. The development of science and technology are not merely controlled by religion; they are subtly eroded into meaninglessness. Carrington goes so far as to say that "Hinduism kept the humam mind in a state of mental retardation from which it has only recently emerged as a result of western influences.t'v" Yet here again we must be careful not to read too much of the "ethereal" wisdom of India's great virtuoso-philosophers into the "material" world in which Indian villagers, merchants, scholars, and rulers have lived. 231 The greatness of India's history, in civilization and knowledge, is 226. Weber, cit supra n. 43, at 289. 227. Op, cit ..supra n. 3, at 231-32. Cf, id. 226. and 0 1 Taoism as the "extreme form" of this passivity, see id. 228-29. 228. Yet here. too, troublesome subsidiary questions arise as to how far Hinduism and Christianity really differ in this regard. Weber, essay cited supra n. 89, finds many examples of Christian tendencies approaching those here discussed. Yet however the line between the two kinds of unworldliness be blurred by such complexities, a line undoubtedly remains. 229. Zimmer, op. cit. supra n. 201, at 19-20. 230. Carrington, op. cit. supra n. 3, at 255. His prediction that this state of affairs is now changing is yet another matter on which interpretations will differ. Carrington for his part confidently asserts that "the gradual replacement of both Hinduism and Buddhism by the values of scientific humanism is already under way ... , and may well be completed within the next hundred years" (id. 225). 231. See D. Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959). The attempt here to study ideas as social realities deserves emulation, the Marxist tinge notwithstanding. The theme of the work is that the oldest Indian "philosophy of the masses" is one of materialism; that traces of this survive into the latter ages of obsession with maya, in particular in the tantras; and that a modern Indian materialism is therefore possible. He is ca eful, however, to disclaim any suggestion that this should involve a "return" to some misleadingly romanticized pact. A. R. Blackshield 81 too solid a refutation of Carrington's sweeping judgments, to be dismissed by condescending acknowledgment of "a reasonably high level of material culture" achieved up to a certain time. Here again, the doctrine of the four life stages has its own ambiguous part to play in Indian cultural attitudes. If study and learning, wealth and worldliness, are to be dismissed as "illusion ," they are also to be sought after as important in their own right. Above all as to the search for knowledge, it is necessary to add that this search is sustained and controlled by the Hindu religion, in a way that almost equates the search with religiousness itself. " Perhaps, here again (as with "dharma" and "law") we are dealing with an ambivalence which is not uniquely Indian. Attitudes to knowledge in most religions tend to be ambivalent. Knowledge may be regarded as nothing less than the most important human avenue of approach to divinity; the search for it, and the handing on of the findings to future generations, are then of the essence of religious concern. On the other hand, intellectual questing may be seen as the very antithesis of the religious way of life-sometimes as prying into matters which are not for man to know, and at any rate as diverting the mind from its true concern with faith. Even those religions which are most fundamentally philosophico-scholarly movements may sometimes tend to conservatism and incuriosity; and even those which are fundamentally assertions of the soul and not of the mind may become intellectualized, often with richly stimulating results. The fact remains that the Christianity of the West, even in the hands of the medieval schoolmen, has never had the intrinsic, self-evident identification with knowledge that is built into Hinduism at its rootS.232 If Hinduism denigrates the search for knowledge as illusory, it also untiringly insists on this search as the very essence of religion. (vii) The Problems of Volksgeist. Indian aspiration still tends to hover somewhat uncertainly over a final choice of three possible commitments. We might dub them "Indian" secularism; "Western" secularism; and a "meeting of East and West." What, in the light of the preceding (and far from exhaustive) sampling of social and philosophical puzzles, are likely to be the realities underlying each? (a) Obviously there are contained in the traditional unity trends of thought and of social practice already imbued with secularism, or at least 232. Weber, cit. supra n. 43, at 268-69, points out that Hinduism begins as the creed of "a hereditary caste of cultured literati," Confucianism "oemen with literary educations who were characterized by a secular rationalism," and Buddhism of "strictly contemplative, mendicant monks." On the other hand Muhammadanism is the creed of "world-conquering warriors," Judaism of "a civic 'pariah people'," and Christianity .. , Of "itinerant artisan journeymen." 82 Secularism and Social Control congenial to it. Yet it is also obvious that modern secular aspirations cannot merely rely on these trends, nor even merely build on them. For within 'their cultural context such trends are usually accompanied by other trends of opposite tenor; and even when secularism is not altogether overborne or drowned out by these, it may still be effectively neutralized. And if we selectively lift out of context those elements that seem useful, then as soon as we do so they art: no longer what they were. If Indian individualism (for instance) isonly ambiguously present, oronly ambiguously secular, we cannot make it fully real or secular simply by husking away its unreal and spiritual elements. This would fully be to falsify Indian culture, not to build upon it. Moreover, the continuity of the ancient tradition into the 1960's is not whole and uninterrupted. It is partially confused, interrupted, and drained away, by fifteen years of progress since independence, and before that by 1: 0 years of British rule which now stand as a barrier between India and her past. On the one hand this means that in building on indigenous values and practices we would not be building on a sure foundation of vital "living law;" 233 on the other hand it means that the would-be architects themselves often cannot be sure precisely what the tradition offers. However, of course, to be sure of this, we should have to break fully open to daylight the welded unity of the traditional society, to layout its components for inspection. In doing this we should probably be achieving substantial secularization in any event. (b) If secularism cannot be revealed or created on the basis exclusively of what is "built-in" in Indian tradition, it must represent in wholeor in part a transplantation from Western civilization. The question then arises as with all such transplants whether the alien concentration can take root. Indian thinkers-sometimes in defiance, sometimes in despair - are often heard to maintain that it cannot. Culture is a gift of history. India is an ancient country; consequently, DO new culture can be imposed on it. Whosoever atternits to do so is bound to fail; he can never succeed. Ours is a culture that has gradually developed with our long history. Swaraj (independence) will have no meaning for our people in the absence of (Indian) cultur.::.234 The problem is not merely that secularism does not "grow out off" the indigenous social inheritance. It is rather that many factors embodied in that inheritance are specifically hostile to "secularism. "i35 The very 233. See Engen Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles of the Sociology 0/ Law (transl, W.L. Moll, 1936) chs, 2-3. 234. S.c. Dq,,~, in 7 C.A.D. (1948) 571, quoted in Luthera, op, cit. supra n. 10, at 143. 235. See the challenging discussion in Stone, op, cit. supra D. 12, at 112-14, where many of these factors are reviewed. And cf, the other passages in that work cited supra nn 189-19::>. A. R. Blackshield 83 fact that Western secularism was to some extent dependent on special features of Christianity, must also give us pause. For religion as we have repeatedly seen is not a homogeneous phenomenon, and what can be done with one religion cannot be done with another. "In no respect can one simply integrate various world religions into a chain of types, each of them signifying i new 'stage.' All the great religions are historical individualities of a highly complex nature."236 (c) In the end, then, independent India is left with the only choice that has ever really been open to her. In a certain sense, neither the Western nor even the Indian tradition is hers. She is separated from the one by foreignness, and from the other by 150 years of British rule. But in another sense she is heir to both. Willy-nilly, the British experience is now itself merely a part of Indian history. It has left deposits of Western practice, social, commercial, legal, political, and administrative structures, and above all broad social values, ideals, and thoughtways, not merely superimposed upon nor tacked on to what is Indian, but incorporated along with the latter into one social inheritance. The Volksgeist of modern India is-in part-a Western Volksgeist, This is not to say that this Eastern/Western ideological patrimony is an easy one to manage. We must not glibly think of the task in terms of abstraction of common elements, or synthesis of the best in both, as if this could automatically follow from acceptance and understanding of both. Acceptance and understanding are themselves what are needed. We cannot merely build upon either of the traditions: by a creative, visionary grasp of both, a new fabric must be woven out of the strands which they have to offer. In part, the task is one of social control, and so f.ills primarily to law (but also to education). In part it is a task of "transmission of culture," and falls primarily to education (but also to law) More than either, it is a task of what might be called "the cultivation of culture"-the sedulous and painstaking nature of both Western and Indian ideals-in which thoughtful men of all professions and walks of life must join. But law and education must still give the lead. Each must seek to instil the secular, but above all to be secular. To be free of specifically religious "control" is hardly even a beginning. Lawyers and judges, as well as legislators and administrators, must seek a new degree of concrete, hard-headed, accurate focus on factual soical issues; a constant search for objective relevancies to the core of dispute, rather than mere verbal echoes of dicta; an easy readiness for distinction ~36. Weber, essay cited supra n, 43, at 292. 84 Secularism and Social Control and fragmentation of specialized rules and concepts.r" rather than escape into 111usory synthesis under the guise of "harmonious construction;" an easy readiness to change and change again, whenever the existing rules - however well settled-do not exactly fit the needs of the case at bar; and above all a constant practical drive for the achievement of socioeconomic justice through law. Only thus (if "secularism"'" means "rolled-up materialism") can Indian law be secular. If this means that Western pragmatism must overcome Indian illusion, so be it. If it means that Indian dharma must overcome Western legalism, so be it also. Education, for its part must continue to be a process of thoroughgoing objectivity and realism. The idea of wholehearted objective devotion to a job; the need for thoroughness and precision and depth of understanding in basic and advanced skills; an ever-ready willingness to experiment and explore; the constant drive to "make good" rather than "make do," but the ability to measure success in terms of quality rather than quantity, whether of handicrafts, agricultural and industrial products, books, or academic degrees; an absolute respect for truth, even (when need be) at the cost of courtesy; a fundamental appreciation of the importance of every human individual, and of the seriousness and worthwhileness and intrinsic interest of "thing-techniques," from handloom weaving to atom-splitting, and of objective factual knowledge generallyall of these must be instilled in the pupils above all the mainfest and unfaltering example of the teacher. This (if "secularism" means "rolledup materialism") is secular education. Yet all this is still not enough. The broad and still perturbing problems that we have noted in the West, of the balance between materialism and crassness; individualism and anti-socialism, moral freedom and moral anomie, already trouble India as well. To the very extent that secularization progressively succeeds, these problems will become more pressing. Indian intellectuals of an older generation were wont to admire and espouse Western ethical ideals, but to distrust Western technology. If India were to finish up by adopting the technology and losing the ideals, it would be a tragedy of agonizing irony for India, and perhaps for the world. Judges and legislators in their zeal for social reform must somehow hold short of ruthlessness; and here perhaps judges, backed by the "fundamental rights" in part III of the Constitution, have a special role to play. Educators must never become so preoccupied with "thingtechniques" that they understress or overlook the need for "cultural" 237. I e. ~or "multiplic'atic;n of working categories." See J. Stone, op. cit. n, 150, at 307-310. supr« A. R. Blackshield 85 education as well. For Rabindranath Tagore,338 eduation was centred on spiritual, humanist and aesthetic values, on "the bond of kinship," the "complete meeting of East or West in a common fellowship of learning and common spiritual striving for .the unity of the human race," and above all on the search for knowledge-e-vthe greatest factor in the unification of mankind';'239 On the brink of an "economic precipice.l'v'? Tagore's aspirations may seem unreal; but some measure of their fulfilment seems essential if India is to continue in her great contribution to the culture of the world, or even in the preservation of her own. Not only, in short, must India's "cultivation of culture" give nurture to both Western and Indian ideals; but beyond this, within each of the two traditions, there must be a nurture of the "ethereal" as well as the "material." 238. It is remarkable fact that in the Indian version of this search for educative balance, the competing views are identified with two of twentieth-century India's greattest charismatic figures, Gandhi and Tagore, See N.C. Bhattacharyya, "Search for a Perspective: Educational Thought in Contemporary India" (1965) 9 Aust. J. Ed. 29. Gandhi's "Basic Education" ("begin the child's education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training") no doubt sits well with economic necessity. with his idealization of village India, and with Indian secularism. But despite acknowledgment of the need for "all-round drawing-out of the best in child and man-body, mind and spirit," it offered "hardly any place for modern science and advanced technology and little concern for higher education" (id. 30). It therefore sits oddly with his own spiritual and cultural greatness, and even with his antipathy to Western materialism and industrialization, G. Ramanathan, Education from Dewey to Gandhi: The Theory of Basic Education (1952) is clearly much too uncritical of both Dewey and Gandhi. But his main thesis as to the link between Gandhi's plans and Dewey's pragmatism rings truer than Bhattacharyya (article cited, at 30-31) would admit. 239. Bhattacharyya, article cited, at 32-33. The quotations are from H.B. Mukherjee, Education for Fulness: A Study ofthe Educational Thought of Rabindranath Tagore (1962) 46, 96, 98, 401. 240. See Segal, op, cit. supra n, 191, at 1730.