The Rational Secular State -- Introduction

I should probably confess from the outset that I have no utopian goals in mind, not simply because I lack ambition, but because I do not believe utopia is possible.  My reasons will become more and more apparent as we go along, but the state cannot be perfected for mankind, nor can mankind be perfected for the state.  the utopian vision, the imagined perfection, inevitably ends up denying that which is most essential to our being human.  The utopian vision always gives precedence to the public over the private, and at the extreme, denies the private altogether.   It would sublimate the subjectivity of the one subject, the individual, to the public imperative, and in doing so the imagined perfection always denies freedom, substituting a single public morality for the possibility of individual moral agency.  One is subject to a single mechanistic possibility that forecloses all other possibilities once and for all, and if the foreclosure is not death outright, then death is an ever present possibility for those who cannot bring their subjectivity into conformity with the public imperative, particularly so for those who must insist upon themselves not only as moral beings within the privacy of their own thoughts, but as moral agents within the public sphere, and the protagonist in the utopian epic, from Metropolis to the Matrix, is always the antagonist, the one who must insist upon himself or herself as a moral agent, even if his or her insistence is conceived in suffering and rewarded with death.

I should probably confess from the outset as well that I must distance myself as well from the radical individualism that gives all precedence to the private over the public.  No one I think denies that we live in a world with others, and that others are part and parcel of the contingency within which we must live our lives.  It is, in effect, the originating question of political philosophy -- how best to live among others -- a question that cannot be answered outside a web of mutually interdependent rights and obligations.  While I might be something of a singularity -- a subjectivity without experiential, only inferential access to another's subjectivity -- my singularity is nevertheless subject to the historical contingency of the here and now, and I can agree with Rorty and others when they insist that there is no privileged position outside the here and now from which to view the here and now.  No one I think believes they are wholly free.  We are all captive within public circumstances that are not wholly of our choosing.  We can be glad for our luck, or curse our fate, and we do have some immediate sway over both, but nothing can change the simple observation that we are a single human being, living a single life, within a single time and place.  Anyone who is living a life knows that we make choices, but those choices are the best one can do here and now, and the result of those choices ad to our mixed bag of suffering and happiness.  Our choices arise out of contingency, affect contingency, and sink back into contingency in ways that cannot be wholly predicted, and that unpredictability precludes not only the possibility of the imagined paradise, but also the wholly consummate individual qua individual.  We navigate, but do not create, our own contingency.

To be continued.