Lloyds excellent article ‘Complex Space or Broken Middle? Milbank, Rose, and the Sharia Controversy’ in Political Theology, 10.2, 2009, develops the idea of the politics of the middle. He suggests that we need to keep philosophy and rhetoric separate. Politics proceeds by rhetoric – trying to convince others that your interests are theirs, even if they are not. Philosophy is there to humble the rhetoric when it begins to be taken too seriously. Political claims are necessary but incomplete. The job of philosophy is to stop any political theology mythos taking hold, but such mythoi should be used by associations to out-narrate one another in gaining allegiances. ‘But commitment in the middle is hypothetical, not categorical. Authorities hold sway provisionally, not absolutely.’
Rowan Williams’ speech on Sharia law was an attempt to work this out. Williams was ‘proposing a framework to institutionalize this humility [of a politics of the middle], a framework that would tame the over-reaching claims of both religious communities and the ostensibly secular state.’ In the end you can always leave an association if you decide you don’t believe it any more (Lloyd recognises this is difficult). This upholds the hypothetical rather than categorical nature of their beliefs. Multiple legal jurisdictions keep them humble and working for the best of people, working to secure their allegiance.
This was a great article, and Lloyd is one of the few people who actually bothered to read and understand Williams, unlike the media and politicians at the time. But I have two questions. Can we prevent mythoi from taking hold? Don’t we have to have a mythos in order to act? And can we really act on it if we don’t really believe in it? Isn’t that lack of belief part of political apathy at the moment (in the UK at least)? Can we really prevent ourselves form elevating our own rhetoric into philosophy?
I agree with Lloyd that Williams’ proposal to institutionalise a political and religious humility is a good idea. Like a politics of the middle it faces up to our pluralist situation and tries to deal with it. It recognises that no beliefs, religions included, can fully answer our questions or exhaust our identity (a good antidote to over-excited ecclesiologies). But surely the state is still going to be somehow controlling. The idea that the state would only interfere to sort out disagreements that cannot be resolved locally doesn’t seem plausible. And governmentality studies would suggest that the state controls or exercises power through various independent and quasi-independent organisations. A politics of the middle seems very attractive but how would it work in practice?
Recent Comments