At its simplest, modernity’s wager is that religion can be replaced with rationality and reason. Seligman says the wager has been lost: this transition cannot be made. His proposed solution is to return to a kind of unquestioned religious belief, but a religion characterized by tolerance.

Shariati, while not articulating the same rationale, presents a similar conclusion. Following in the legacy of Al e Ahmad, who mourned what he saw as Iran’s self-loathing love of the West, Shariati called for “a return to an authentic Islam as an answer to modern problems” (Secor, 13). This solution built upon Al e Ahmad’s ideas by claiming that liberal, ‘modern’ ideas of the West were authentically Islamic— because these ideas did not belong to the West, but were born of Islam. Shariati advocated for a “limited freedom,” where the “liberated” Iran could “subordinate their will to the will of God.” In this way, Shariati’s claim seems to replicate at least part of Seligman’s: humans are liberated, but with (and even through) constraints placed upon them by a higher authority.

I think there is, however, a marked difference between Shariati and Seligman. Shariati argues against a need for clerics, taking the stance that there was no need for mediation between God and man. His claim that Islam was “open to multiple, competing orientations” seems at first take to mirror the ‘tolerance’ prescribed by Seligman. More deeply, though, this undercuts the main basis of Seligman’s proposition– that what is needed is unquestioned belief in a set of basic tenets— as Shariati’s solution still places man as the ultimate arbiter of right/ wrong, as each person can interpret the will of God in their own way. For Shariati, then, the problem is one of authenticity; his utilization of Islam allows for modernity to be ‘claimed’ as Iranian. Shariati’s wager, it seems, would be that without this claim to authenticity, ‘modernity’ would destroy Iran, leading to a similar consequence as that posed by Seligman— the people would be left ‘placeless’ and would become inheritors of an anomic condition.

I think Seligman’s argument in Modernity’s Wager can be brought into better relief by pairing it with the concept of religious nationalism as proposed by Aghaie. While Seligman aims to disprove the claim that religion, specifically religious authority, and modernity are antithetical to each other, Aghaie similarly argues against a view of nationalism which insists on its secularism. Both push back against the desire for increasing secularity and argue for some form of compromise with religion. Where they differ, is in their academic arenas. While Seligman writes in the flighty and incarnate language of philosophy, which is ultimately interested in the modern self, Aghaie points to the physical substantiations of religiosity, writing that “religious nationalism is a symbolic discourse imbued with religious piety, social values, identity, culture, and symbolic referents. This discourse is necessarily substantiated in interpersonal interactions, explaining a cultural conversation around nationalism, but not directly addressing this religiosity’s implications for the modern self. Although their arenas of study are different, Aghaie’s religious nationalism represents the antithesis to the “privatization” of religion which frustrates Seligman. The philosophers who helped craft this public form of religious nationalism have all attempted to resolve Seligman’s problematic in one way or another.

Of these figures, I lean towards Abdolkarim Soroush as being the most successful at achieving Seligman’s aim, but also perhaps the one most precariously leaning towards remaking the wager. Soroush is insistent that Islam should be a part of Iranian nationalism. He tempers this, however, by arguing in favor of a synthesis of three components; national heritage, Islamic heritage, and western culture (Aghaie 190). This argument was fundamentally a refutation of “westoxication” but it also has bearing on Seligman.

Seligman is ultimately interested, not in returning to some previous form of authoritarian religiosity, but in adopting a tolerant and skeptical religious belief that continues to allow the expression of the individual. This is quite similar to the views Secor accredits to Soroush. Of his view on theology, she writes “although faith might be ineffable at its core, the human effort to understand and apply God’s truths was one grounded in the limits, the methods, and the temporality of all human studies” (Secor, 74). Soroush believes firmly in the importance of certain, “ineffable” truths, but he continues to apply reason and skepticism to them, thus creating the tolerance Seligman argues in favor of. There is of course, the danger that in trusting too much in reason, Soroush remakes the wager Seligman has outlined. It seems that the skepticism Seligman desires must always put one perilously close to this edge.

Ali Shariati’s works effectively corroborate Seligman’s thesis that modernity’s wager was lost, or, perhaps better put, Seligman’s book provides justification for the ideologies and strategies that Sharihati used in helping to craft a new Iranian political consciousness. Seligman thought that modernity had failed society; while Shariati was not convinced that modernity in its generally accepted form had failed the world, he was certain that it did not provide the proper solutions for Iran.

Shariati, when viewed through a Seligman lens, was looking to reclaim modernity through surrendering individual or “rational” control over all decisions and creating a more centered populace capable of applying both logical thought and religious principle to events in their day-to-day lives. Just as Seligman viewed humanity as inherently based in some set of commonly accepted notions of “divinity,” Shariati saw Iran as naturally grounded in Islamic principles and having been tempted away from those principles by the West’s “violent road to modernity.” Shariati did not seek to wholly eradicate this modernity, recognizing that his people had reached a certain point of enlightenment at which it would be impossible for them to govern their lives solely on trust in Allah. However, he did envision a society in which the political intellectual freedoms protected and espoused by a republic would be counterbalanced by the fundamental code of Islam. Shariati’s writings can be seen as galvanizing a practical application of Seligman’s theory.

Regarding Vahdat, I see both Seligman and the Iranian thinkers we have studied as providing evidence for the possibility of a harmonious co-existence between universality and subjectivity.  Philosophy is not reality however, and modern Iran (including events during the revolution that effectively created it) provides evidence that undermines the potentiality of said harmonious co-existence in its originally imagined form.

In his work Modernity’s Wager, Seligman argues that Modernity’s abandonment of religion has failed and that religious authority should be returned. The eponymous wager, Seligman argues, is that it is possible “to construct an authoritative locus of sacrality on a foundation of transcendental rather than transcendent dictates” (12). This modernist construction holds individuality and rationality as transcendental, displacing the centrality of religion.

Shariati and Motahhari reflected and promoted the notion of mediated subjectivity, a scheme in which human subjectivity is contingent upon God’s subjectivity. This means that while human subjectivity is not denied, it is never independent of God and is thus mediated by the divine. In this way, Shariati and Motahhari try to maintain some account of human autonomy and individualism while still keeping this account fundamentally moored to theistic notions of a transcendent being.

In God and the Juggernaut, Vahdat draws on Kant and Hegel to define modernity via its two pillars of subjectivity and universality, with subjectivity acknowledging the autonomous and self-conscious agent and universality being the recognition amongst autonomous individuals of the subjectivity of each other. While Seligman seems to suggest that modernity and religion are fundamentally incompatible, Vahdat shows how the Iranian struggle to come to grips with modernity led to a degree of convergence with Muslim Iranian thinkers appropriating notions of modern subjectivity, as was mentioned above. In this way, Vahdat undermines the assumptions underpinning Seligman’s argument.

Please note:  Blog posts for this week are due on Saturday, the responses to a response on Sunday.

Adam Seligman offers a provocative claim of loss and anomie against what he describes as modernity’s lost wager. In what ways do the religious thinkers and politicians that we’ve studied so far, including Taqizadeh, Al e Ahmad, Shariati, Motahhari, Soroush, among many others (please pick at least one) replicate or resolve the problematic that lies at the heart of Seligman’s book?  Alternatively, how does Farzin Vahdat’s book, God and Juggernaut, affirm or disconfirm the arguments of Modernity’s Wager?