Charles Taylor and the conditions of secularity

In the opening pages of The Secular Age Charles Taylor outlines something rather interesting about the contemporary shift to a culture of secularity - meaning specifically, an age in which religion has become very much an option.

It goes something like this:

Every society and every person lives with some conception of what human flourishing constitutes, or what a fulfilled life resembles. In religions, the best human living includes aiming at a final goal somewhat beyond ordinary human flourishing. In Christianity, loving and worshipping God is the ultimate end; though of course it is true that God wills human flourishing in Christianity. But, writes Taylor: the believer...is called upon to make a profound inner break with the goals of floursihing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of..renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God...

This isn't just masochism (as it might be with the Stoics): for Christians, renunciation is only meaningful if the thing renounced (ie life itself) is worth having in the first place:

God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose afflictions he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good...

So: flourishing is good, but not the ultimate goal of human life.

What Taylor is describing in his book is a humanism in which there are no final goals beyond human flourishing, 'nor allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing'. Never before in human history has this 'self-sufficing humanism' become a widely available option. 'A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people'.

This is an entirely new context: there is now no naive acknowledgement of the transcendent, or of goals that go beyond ordinary human flourishing. 'Naivete' says Taylor 'is now unavailable to anyone, believer, or unbeliever alike.'

The implications of what Taylor is saying for Christian missions are enormous. We live in a completely new context of believing/unbelieving. Arguably, in Australia this has been a development only since the 1960s! The is no precedent (if Taylor is right) for missions to a society in which, en masse, people do not see belief in some transcedent other as a necessity. Believing is entirely contigent for Mr and Mrs Average living in their cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The temptation of course will be to cast Christianity entirely in terms of human flourishing - and there are left and right-wing versions of this...

My Charles Taylor article in SCE

The December issue of Studies in Christian Ethics is out, and with it my article entitled:

" ‘In Spirit and In Truth’ - Can Charles Taylor help the Woman at the Well find her authentic self? "

Studies in Christian Ethics 2008 21: 325-341.

If you would like to read a copy, let me know (with your email address, if I don't already have it) and I can send you one. Or at least the first 25 of you.

Boosters or knockers?

As Charles Taylor puts it, there are those critics of contemporary culture who cast themselves in the role of 'knockers' - ie, they have a gloomy outlook on the contemporary world and chart a decline in moral standards since the 1960s. The opposite outlook belongs to the 'boosters', who are characteristically more optimistic about the progress of humanity in the current era.

Now, it is customary for evangelical preachers to be 'knockers': they will, without fail, offer a social analysis that is very negative. In trying to contrast the biblical view to the current world view, they characteristically talk about the decline in standards, about modern individualism and so on. The contemporary world is cast as one in which something valuable has been lost.

Like Taylor, I want to say that things are more complicated than either the boosters or the knockers realise. Sociologically, I think it is inaccurate to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I think standards have changed to some degree - and in some ways definitely for the better (contrary to what you hear from evangelical pulpits).

Theologically, I want to say that human beings have not become MORE evil in recent decades - the pre 1960s past was not a golden era of human morality and we would be greatly mistaken to read it as such, or to portray the gospel as a nostalgic hankering after a society that never existed anyhow. It is right to try and discern what the particular evils of our times are: but not to see them as charting a decline necessarily.

There's more to say, but - I'd love to hear what you think.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VIII

Intellectual Deviation Story Right at the close of The Secular Age, Taylor deploys this term to refer to other historical accounts which are not, he feels, in conflict with his, although they are different. He cites John Milbank's work as an example. Milbank sources the rise of the secular to the work of Scotus and Occam - the nominalists who critiqued late medieval realism (a la Aquinas). The link is made between nominalism and mechanist science; an instrumental view of human agency; and the distinction between nature and supernature. The sense of a great analogy of being falls away. Once this move has been made, God becomes more easily conceivable as a Prime Mover and Designer.



This is what Taylor calls the 'Intellectual Deviation' story, or ID. He accepts it as complementary to his version, but doesn't think that it is the main story behind secularity. Rather, Taylor sees what he calls the Reform Master Narrative as the most important explanation. ID is not the mass phenomenon it needs to be to pull off the secular turn... It just doesn't deliver enough social imaginary to be convincing.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VII

Secularity 1, 2, 3 Taylor distinguishes between three senses of 'secularity'.
Secularity 1 has to do with public spaces allegedly emptied of God. Our common institutions and practices have been deliberately drained of any reference to God or to the ultimate. You can do politics, and never meet God.

Secularity 2 has to do with the falling off of religious belief and church attendance. Of course, 1 and 2 are not at all the same, though they are often felt to be. The framers of secularity 1 had no intention of inducing secularity 2 (think of the American Constitution).

Secularity 3 however is the one that interests Taylor the most. It is related to both the other senses, but: it focuses on the conditions of belief. This shift to secularity consists in a move 'from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace' (The Secular Age p. 3).

Thus, Taylor says, is his intention: 'the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others'.

Now, church attendance in the US may be as high as mosque attendance in Pakistan. But it still may be the case that the US is secular in the 3rd sense. Why? That's what Taylor wants to know.

In a way, he will 'blame' Protestantism and particularly Calvinism for making an option possible...

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - VI

The Immanent Frame In trying to describe the 'conditions of belief' which now obtain in the modern West, Taylor coins the term 'The Immanent Frame'. The buffered self which arises in the age of Reform (of which more later) moves in a constructed social space 'where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular' (The Secular Age, p. 542).

In addition, this frame constitutes now the 'natural' order as distinct from the 'supernatural' one. Instead of the two orders being intertwined, the transcendent is now seen as quite separate from the immanent - which condition of course makes it possible later on to disavow the transcendent altogether.

So, the rise of the individual, now called to a more rigorous and disciplined life in the affirmed ordinary world, coupled with the emphasis on constructive action (because Providence itself now works via the medium of human action) and seen in the context of time now measured accurately by machines rather than charted by prophets or seers in epochal terms - these conditions comprise 'the immanent frame'.

If you are to be a religious believer, you have to believe against the backdrop of these conditions of belief, then.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - V

Horizons of Significance For Taylor, our selfhood is necessarily dialogical. We are selves with reference to 'horizons of significance', as he explains in his The Ethics of Authenticity.
Personal authenticity can’t be defended in ways that deny horizons of significance. In fact (and here Taylor is especially suggestive of the theological) even the sense that choice is the root of my personal significance is grounded on the understanding that ‘independent of my will there is something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape to my own life’.(p. 39)

Horizons of significance come to us from outside of ourselves: they are given. There is already, anterior to the choices of the individual, a picture (or pictures) of what human beings are like, or ought to be. Even positing self-choice in itself as a moral ideal requires that there are choices that themselves are significant. As Taylor says, ‘[I] can define my identity only against the background of things that matter’ (p. 40); and if I am to bracket out from consideration history, nature, society and everything except for that which I find in myself, I am surely not choosing for myself anything other than the trivial. ‘Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands’ (p. 41). Some reference to the self-transcending – whether God, nature, nation, ideology or whatever else – is necessary for authentic selfhood. Choice itself cannot be basic.

Fair enough: but is it a distraction to see this as pre-theological in some way? Can we just substitute in any 'horizon', as if there were ready made alternatives that we could just attatch?

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - IV

The buffered self. This is one of my favourited Taylorisms, suggesting as it does a figure wearing a kind of padded suit...

The buffered self is the self that develops in early modernity in contrast to the 'open and porous and vulnerable' self of the previous epoch. That former individual, living in a world that was held to be 'enchanted', was vulnerable to the world of spirits and powers. The porous self is exposed to the whims of a suprahuman benevolence or malevolence residing in the cosmos. His feelings are bound up with goings on that are external to him - the motions of the stars and so on. He lives in a world not inconceivably that far different from a Bosch painting.

The buffered self, by contrast, is able to take a distance from everything outside the mind. This self can 'see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it'. (The Secular Age, p 38). The buffered self may read a Bosch painting as a code for various inner states, but he has been taken out of the world in which these are thought of as external conditions.

However (and here is Taylor's punchline): despite the appearance of the buffered self there is also a powerful nostalgia for the porous self. Of course, we do this as mere tourists, trying to get an impression of what it must have been like to be really porous by having our stars read - but, as Taylor says, 'Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can't get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.' (p. 38) Taylor of course goes on to chart the role of Protestantism in producing the buffered self.

I am interested that this powerful nostalgia for the porous self is being played out within Christian theology at present. The Radical Orthodoxy is only its most esoteric and elitist manifestation. But popular spirituality both Catholic and Protestant evinces this yearning to be more porous - more richly metaphysical in its encounter with the phenomena of the material world. I think our 16th century forebears, who were so relieved to be liberated from enslavement to this kind of vulnerability to the world inhabited by ghosts and demons, would have thought this daffy, just as Taylor points out.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians III

By the way, you really must check out The Immanent Frame.

Social Imaginary Taylor uses this term in his latest work The Secular Age, but also in Modern Social Imagineries. He means by it to indicate something of the way people imagine their social existence. It is crucially an act of imagination rather than an intellectual scheme: it involves the myths and stories and legends that we tell about our common life and identity, and so on. As Taylor puts it, he means how people 'fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations'. (MSI, p. 23)This term, then, can include the way ordinary people think about their common identity as well as a more elitist, theoretical account.

Of course, it is a complex business to describe a social imaginary, because it is a complex idea! It 'incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life.' (MSI, p. 24) And yet, this term is crucial for Taylor's project: because it is 'social imaginaries', modern and less modern, that he is largely in the business of describing. It is part of his intellectual bravery that he is willing to embark on such a risky strategy, because it is so obviously open to challenge at every point of the description.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - II

The Affirmation of Ordinary Life: This term is probably not really a Taylorean invention, but it features very prominently in his account of the history of ideas. As he says, the affirmation of ordinary life 'has become one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilisation' (Sources of the Self , p. 14). Though it has avowedly secular variants (such as utilitarianism), it is a term associated with the theological shift in the Reformation period away from the spirituality of the elite and towards the sanctification of the everyday. 'With the Reformation, we find a modern, Christian-inspired sense that ordinary life was..the very centre of the good life.' (p. 13). You could, with Luther, praise God while changing a baby's nappy. You could labour in your dead-end job and still possess the dignity and spirituality of a monk.
The fruit of this affirmation of the ordinary include a protest against needless suffering and an emphasis on human welfare and dignity. And it underlies much of political self-understanding in the West even today.

A Taylorean Glossary for Theologians - I

Readers of this blog - both of you - know that I am a bit of a fan of Canada's greatest contemporary philosopher, Charles Taylor. Not that I am uncritical: but, what a voice he has! Taylor, like many great philosophers, works up his own vocabulary - a repository of terms which become a shorthand for the arguments already established. I thought a glossary of these terms might be a useful thing. However, I find that whenever I propose to myself that I will do a series on this blog, it is a guarantee that I won't complete it... so, no promises...

Subtraction Story - In his The Secular Age, Taylor calls a 'subtraction story' any of those 'stories of modernity in general and secularity in particular which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.' (p. 22) These stories chart the emergence and liberation of true human nature from the imprisoning forces of religion, now set aside. The Secular Age is Taylor's vigorous response to this kind of narrative. He wants to argue that subtraction stories are mistaken because they do not see the new-ness of Western modernity. Secularity comes not from seeing things that were there in the first place, but from the construction of new self-understandings and practices - things that cannot be seen as always residual in human life.

Talal Asad - On Suicide Bombing

Talal Asad is a terrifically interesting writer on religion and secularism - though his views are certainly not incontestable. I picked up a copy of his book On Suicide Bombing.

In its opening pages he writes that:

...I draw on some aspects of Christian theology: the crucifixion is the most famous suicide in history, whose horror is transmuted into the project of redeeming universal humanity - again through a combination of cruelty and compassion. p. 3

I did a double-take of course. A suicide? Hmm... Turning to the later passages in his book he DOES have some very interesting things to say about the atonement (as Charles Taylor does in The Secular Age). But he takes as his guide Aulen's very dated Christus Victor...

Fergus Kerr on Charles Taylor

Kerr's book Immortal Longings is a magnificent treatment of the subject of the self in contemporary philosophy and theology. Of Charles Taylor he says (rightly I think):

...Taylor insists that some explanatory frameworks give us a better sense of reality than others. True, it is not easy to judge one superior to another without appealing to epistemological foundations that stand outside all frameworks, or merely to list the technological achievements of Western science (say). There can be no going back on the lesson of modern philosophy: we have no access to sources of knowledge independently of whatever conceptual scheme we have in place. But pragmatic success is not a good enough criterion either: for one thing, what counts as success may vary from one society to another. p. 137

Charles Taylor - A Secular Age III

Taylor's book is studded with great insights, and written with the lucidity of a chat over coffee. I have interrupted the story of the switch from the porous self to the buffered self to dip into the book at more random places today. This stood out, given my recent thinking about matters papal:

The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured. People seem at a safe distance from religion; and yet they are very moved to know that there are dedicated believers, like Mother Teresa. The unbelieving world, well used to disliking Pius XII, was bowled over by John XXIII. A Pope just had to sound like a Christian, and many immemorial resistances melted...It's as though many people who don't want to follow want nevertheless to hear the message of Christ, want it to be proclaimed out there. The paradox was evident in the response to the late Pope. Many people were inspired by John Paul's public perpatetic preaching, about love, about world peace, about international economic justice. They are thrilled that these things are being said. But even many Catholics among his admireres didn't feel that they must follow his all his moral injunctions... (p. 727)

What does this mean for a diocese at mission, like the Sydney diocese?

Buffered self vs porous self

Sounds kind of painful, doesn't it? But this is the way Charles Taylor describes the difference between the outlook of the individual of 1500 and the contemporary person.

The pre-modern self is 'porous' because it thought of itself as deeply situated in an enchanted world and open to being influenced and signified by forces emanating from that world.

The 'buffered' self of modernity considers its purposes and meanings as arising not from without but from within.

Take emotions for example: a depressed porous self may consider himself prey to cosmic realities that can affect us. Suffering from melancholy, he may cite the presence of black bile which is not the cause of melancholy: it IS melancholy. The depression is part of being embedded in a universe redolent with meanings. He is in the grip of the real thing.

The depressed buffered self on the other hand will be able to take a step of disengagement from his feelings by saying 'it is just my body chemistry' - and take a pill. The chemistry doesn't have the meaning - it just feels that way.

How did this change in perspective come about? Well, I do think the Reformation had more than a little to do with it. That is, there was a specifically theological change of tack that led to the disenchantment of the universe. I wonder if Taylor shares this thought...

Charles Taylor - A Secular Age

Well Charles Taylor's mighty effort A Secular Age is here. I am daunted by the prospect: I am still chewing over things I learnt in Sources of the Self.

His opening ploy is to say that the word 'secular' has been used in three senses. 'Secularity 1' describes the secularisation of public spaces - it is the official separation of church and state for example, or the insistence that religious arguments be inadmissable in public debate.

'Secularity 2' however has come about at pretty much the same time. And that is the decline of religious belief and practice. Now, S1 needn't mean S2: in the US there is a very strong sense of S1 but if anything a stronger sense that S2 is not occuring.

But Taylor's object in this study is S3: which he says 'consists of new conditions of belief; it consists in a new shape to the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief; in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed.' (p. 20) Or, earlier he says 'the change I want to define and trace is on e which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one possibility among others...Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.'

Secularity in this sense is a whole context of understanding, in which our moral/religious quest takes place. Taylor interestingly argues that S1 did not bring about S2, as is commonly thought: but it did bring about or had a share in bringing about S3...

The politics of recognition

Taylor's suggestion in this landmark essay is that, in fact, we ought to act with the presumption or premise that we owe equal respect to all cultures. It involves, he says, an act of faith. The claim: 'that all human cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human beings.' (He does get vague when it matters, ole Charlie T.). But this operates as a presumption, a starting point, which has to be demonstrated concretely in actual encounter.

However, in this encounter with another culture, we have to learn ourselves to move in a broader horizon, to develop new vocabularies of comparison:

if and when we ultimately find substantive support for our initial presumption, it is on the basis of an understanding of what constitutes worth that we couldn't possibly have had at the beginning. We have reached the judgement partly through transforming our standards.

Charles Taylor and difference-blind liberalism

There's a form of liberalism that imagines it can offer a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and co-exist. And it polices that ground - the prosecution of the 'Catch the Fire' ministry for saying some pretty awful things about Muslims in Victoria is a case in point.
On this view, it is necssary to distinguish public and private, religion and politics and so on, so that you can put contentious difficulties into a non-political sphere as far as possible.

Taylor writes:

...a controversy like that over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses shows how wrong this view is. FOr mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground of all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges. Moreover, as many Muslims are well aware, Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, postreligious outlook that happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals as a more organic outgrowth of Christianity - at least as seen from the alternative vantage point of Islam. The division of church and state goes back to the earliest days of Christian civilisation.

(Taylor, 'The politics of recognition' p. 62)

Some holiday reading

Sacha gazes out over Prague.

Prague Castle with St Vitus' Cathedral from the Charles Bridge.

OK - we are are back. Czech Republic was great. Sadly, the churches seems to be emptied out shells, and I could see no evidence of Protestantism at all. The land of Jan Hus is no longer a place of the kind of preaching he was known for, even though his statue is in the Old Town Square.

I read while I was away:

Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost. I went through an Ondaatje phase back in the mid 90s - I read all his poetry and novels. Loved his poetic style and his depictions of love and pain. He is a writer who really knows about the human body. Then I never got around to this novel which he sets in his native Sri Lanka. It is brilliantly written - three or four terrific, wounded characters. And more suffering of an appalling kind mixed in with illicit and licit love. The narrative has a kind of CSI flavour which is becoming a bit tired now after all those TV shows (the main character is a forensic anthropologist).

Franz Kafka - The Trial. OK, I tried here and failed again. I have tried several times to enjoy this book and where better then in Kafka's home town? But frankly, it is a dull book. Perhaps it is badly translated...

Will Self - The Book of Dave. I enjoyed this immensely. I am a self-confessed Self fan (??). He is a real surrealist. This is a kind of dystopian fantasy of what England would like if the mad, racist and misogynist ranting of a London cabbie of today were written on metal plates and found in a post-apocalyptic future and then treated as a divine revelation. It is a non-too-subtle satire of revealed religion and its capacity to wreak havoc. But Self also endears us to Dave, who by the end of the novel has been redeemed sufficiently to have written a second, more humane book... Wonderful passages written entirely in Cockney.

Sam Wells - God's Companions. I have to review this book - as I said before, I think it is frustratingly cheesy. I won't put it like that in my review...the best thing is that Wells has discovered the local church as the site of theo-praxis. Evangelicals I think have know that the local church is where the action is for years. The emphasis on symbolic practices is curious to me: Wells wants us to practice foot-washing, for example. It is funny that ritualists read scripture literally at this point, and non-ritualists read it metaphorically...

Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imagineries. Interesting take on the way in which revolutions come about and why or why not they are successful. There needs to be a vision of what a society could be under a new regime - merely opposing the current ruler will produce chaos unless there is a deeply felt sense of an alternative national/social/political identity. Why did the Velvet revolution succeed in 1989 without bloodshed? Because it was obvious to the Czechs that there was another and better way of being Czech, without communism. Maybe Taylor is only saying what is obvious in different words... also, he clearly feels he has earned the right to make sweeping historical statements without footnotes or evidence. It is hard to challenge him when he is writing like this.

Roger Scruton - Modern Culture. Scruton is a fabulous English conservative. The real thing. And thoroughly Kantian. His thesis in this book is that without religion 'high' culture will die. He mounts a sterling defence of high culture against the dominance of 'cultural' 'studies' in our schools and universities. I have to say he has my sympathies: good writing just is good writing I am afraid. You can't make pop culture better by clever criticism of it I am afraid. One of his best points is that the canon of Western culture is already a tolerant and diverse and self-critical canon - and is so because of Christianity. To present as a single monolithic ideology is simply false. Scruton is an unabashed Kantian, and I feel this is his great weakness - because he presents Kant's view of religion rather than the really Christian one. Christianity for Scruton seeps out of the English soil and is the natural accompaniment to Englishness. Only an Anglican of a certain blinkered and rural kind could think that.

Charles Taylor's 'social imagineries'

Taylor offers an interesting analysis of the ways in which societies conceive of themselves:

By social imaginery, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectuual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how thigs go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. 'Modern Social Imagineries' p. 23

To talk about a social 'theory' is not enough to capture this, because people don't think of their societies in terms of a theory so much as in terms of legends, myths, values and images. However, theories can infiltrate the social imagineries by a kind of trickle-down effect.