Jurgen Habermas died on Saturday, March 14. I encountered Habermas first through his book Legitimation Crisis (Beacon Press, 1973), required reading in an undergraduate class I took on the Frankfurt School of Marxism. I found his writing to be impenetrable; I’m not the only one, as the New York Times obituary of Habermas quotes one philosopher as saying that reading Habermas is like chewing on glass. Then later on, Habermas came to speak at the college I attended. He had a speech impediment and a thick German accent, and that coupled with his impenetrable writing style meant I understood not a word of what he said. I found this very frustrating, but also acknowledged to my self that much of the fault was mine — I wasn’t dogged enough to force myself to read Habermas in any depth.
Yet I read enough to realize he was brilliant, and that he represented the kind of society that I wanted to be a part of. He asserted the value of reason and rationality — this in the face of the widespread embrace of postmodernist baloney that swept through late twentieth century Western thinking. He continued to assert the value of truth and rationality through the early twenty-first century, in the face of cynicism from both right and left. The cynics were wrong. Society could be made better, Habermas said, and we could make it better by better in part by learning how to communicate with one another. And while it would be easy to criticize him for writing such dense impenetrable prose in his books, leading to a lack of communication, he also wrote for the popular press in Germany where he lived.
Although a staunch upholder of Enlightenment atheism, in his later years he came to understand the importance of religious institutions. In 2007, he participated in a public discussion with the Jesuit School for Philosophy, which resulted in the 2008 book Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was felt; translated into English in the 2010 book An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Polity Press). I read his essays in that book not lang after it came out, and I had forgotten how much his closing essay in that book has influenced me, until I picked it up again upon hearing of his death. He wrote:
“Secular morality is not inherently embedded in communal practices. Religious consciousness, by contrast, preserves an essential connection to the ongoing practice of life within a community, and in the case of the major world religions, to the observances of united global communities of all the faithful. The religious consciousness of the individual can derive stronger impulses towards action in solidarity, even from a purely moral point of view, from this universalistic communitarianism. Whether this is still the case today I leave to one side.”
This short excerpt helps define one of the reasons that make me think that religion is still relevant in today’s world: the need for communities that support solidarity in moral action — and further, to link to other similarly constituted communities to support worldwide moral action. It is fashionable in the West to disparage organized religion as outmoded and useless, but there is no other Western institution to fill this void. Part of today’s crisis of polarization and lack of communication can be traced to the decline of communities that support solidarity in moral action; and part of the challenge facing organized religion today is to recognize one or our primary purposes is to promote some kind of universalistic communitarianism.
These days, when I’m trying to explain to someone why they might want to be part of our congregation, I talk about the importance of being part of a values-based community that aims to influence the world locally, nationally, and globally. This turns out to be far more convincing than saying things like “you can believe whatever you want” (you can do that anywhere), “it’s a great place to raise kids” (only works if you have kids), or any of the other old bromides we used to repeat. Jurgen Habermas nailed it — we need for communities that support solidarity in moral action, and you need and want to be a part of that.