Warning: this
entry is not particularly funny. It also
uses several annoyingly big words.
This year I
will be taking comprehensive exams as another step in my process of academic consecration. We all have the processes by which we are
certified to get paid to do stuff, so I’m not here to complain about that. Rather, I’m gathering thoughts and decided
that I should submit these ramblings to whatever public scrutiny this blog may
attract in order to gain some outside perspective while I write. All this being said, I study comparative religious ethics but am uncomfortable
with the term "comparative"...and "religious"...and
"ethics.” Here is a brief outline
of what makes me uncomfortable with each term and its application in the
academic subfield of comparative religious ethics.
Comparative: When
one endeavors to study a person or group of people they are implicitly engaged
in an act of comparison (comparing their data to some kind of ideal type or
mode of categorization, or past experience, etc.). In this sense, then, all studies are
comparative, this field simply attemps to make the comparisons explicit. In
order to engage in explicitly comparative work, then, one must make a conscious
and continual effort to maintain a certain amount of differences between social
groups/works/people being studied in order for the “C” to remain…however, one
must simultaneously produce enough similarities to warrant a comparison
(develop an overarching category (see: Religion, below). This tiered act of taxonomic ordering carries
with it the same problems of all social orderings (yes, “all.” There are problems with
universal/absolute/general declarations, yadda yadda, sorrynotsorry), namely
the valuation of objects ordered (some things, voices, works, people are given
more value than others). Further, only
those endowed with certain amount of recognized power are able to successfully
implement their orderings…which makes one wonder: from what position does the
scholar of CRE speak? Certainly a
question to be asked of all scholars, but comparativists seem especially prone
to embrace the ever-comfortable-even-if-highly-problematic position of “neutral
scholarly distance.” This brings me to
Religious: Declaring
something “religious” and something else “not religious” or “secular” is a
tactic used by some social groups to disregard/discredit the claims made by
other communities or dissenters within their own. It also tends to imply that some experiences
are above/beyond the social sphere. When
a scholar takes the distinction between religious and secular as her or his
starting point – taking the distinction as a given or natural – she or he runs
the risk of re-producing the various social mechanisms that are used to
maintain this distinction (voices silenced alongside unexamined ideas of the
proper mode of collective life). In
other words, one chooses sides in a social argument without explicitly choosing
sides (thereby concealing/ignoring that the analyst is a social actor
her/himself with a dog in this fight). Further,
when one assumes that there is some kind of otherworldly, extra-social realm
that can not be subjected to critical scrutiny, she or he provides
justification for the very social consequences of those claims – certain ideas
and social orderings (as well as their consequences) are “off limits.” With
regard to CRE, when one explicitly compares one or more “religious” person/group/work,
is she/he merely multiplying these difficulties? Finally, there is the tricky concept of
Ethics: A study of ethics or morality is typically
couched in terms of reflection on the good or best individual life or mode of
collective living. I can’t do this. I can’t suspend the power question (as one
might have guessed) long enough to reflect on what it means to live a good life
(perhaps there’s more examining to do here on what my actions/scholarship imply
about the life worth living). Collective
existence depends on inequality.
Reflections on the good life ignore this fact or attempt to find a way
around it. Further, when the inequality becomes
deeply entrenched in a state bureaucracy (or any highly organized social
grouping; see: Weber) the ability of enforcement mechanisms to silence critique
grows exponentially. Those charged with
maintaining the status quo and those giving inequality a prettier façade create
a situation where the critic is forced to join the game or suffer the
consequences. Ethical norms are
conventions used to maintain certain social arrangements and to ignore these
arrangements in the pursuit of reflecting on the good life is highly
problematic (This critique can be made on a macro level, as I just have, or on
a micro level when examining various smaller social groups – for instance, the
ethical norms and values that make one a good scholar (originality, lack of
plagiarism, scholarly respect, etc.) are conventions that allow for easy
replication of a community of scholars).
My goal in this
blog series is to examine these preliminary (though informed) theoretical
difficulties in my field of study (and the practice of scholarship more
generally). I’m not sure how many posts
this will entail, but it will be at least three more – at least one each that
more fully examines my misgivings with the scholarly act of explicit
comparison, the academic study of religion, and the academic study of ethics
(probably in that order). Several more
may crop up over the course of these musings (I have a feeling that once I
start thinking about it, I’ll see that I’m making a lot of assumptions about
what counts as scholarship and that the universal declarations above may not
entirely hold up). I also hope that
anyone who reads this will raise issues and point me towards other areas that I
overlook or have not completely thought through.
On the other
hand, I might see something funny and get distracted.
Thanks for
reading.
