I. Why so secular?
I have, for several years, had a vague sense that western society was burning through some type of cultural capital that we had painstakingly accumulated and stewarded over hundreds of years without necessarily realizing we were doing it. I’ll only give two examples, because it tends to touch on culture war issues and culture war issues are very tangential to the book at hand, but I thought it might be useful to explain my motivation for picking up a 900-page book on the history of Latin Christendom and why I might emphasize certain aspects of this tome over others.
So when someone left a comment on Marginal Revolution (I no longer remember the article) and said "if you want to understand how we slowly dismantled the Christian world view by removing, piece-by-piece, everything that once held it up read, Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age," I thought it might provide some answers or at least better questions.
Charles Taylor's book covers a lot of ground: the role of poetry and language in approaching the transcendent, the function of violence in society, prominent figures in the Vatican II council (He spends a decent amount of time talking about someone named Charles Péguy), how Thomas Carlyle fits into Enlightenment thought, the fourth Lateran council of 1215, and Matthew Arnold. But what I think it's really about is how cognitive bias works not at an individual level but at a societal level.
Taylor defines his project largely in terms of what he opposes: the simplistic theory that religiosity declined and secularity ascended because our scientific understanding of the world made our religious understanding increasingly untenable. That we had no choice, upon facing an increasingly incontrovertible truth, to reject faith. He is arguing against the idea that religion, over the last 500 years, has simply retreated before reason.
I’m not sure if this is a strawman or not. I don’t think I’ve ever asked someone to explain their views on secularity or to justify their atheism. But it does accord with how I have tended to think about it. On the other hand, can it possibly be true? Should we expect such an orderly, rational process of gradual enlightenment? Taylor thinks we should be extremely skeptical of this pleasant-feeling, self-congratulating narrative.
From my own perspective, psychologists have been telling us for decades that we are plagued by bias and motivated reasoning, turned away from truth by tribalism and emotional rhetoric. So, isn’t it at least possible that such foibles have not only served as obstacles to our gradual enlightenment but in some ways actually propelled it forward? And wouldn’t it be totally like humanity to convince ourselves that, No, we were being perfectly rational about all this the whole time.
But let’s back up.
What do we mean when we say secular? Taylor says that one sense in which we understand this is "in terms of public spaces." Today we can engage in almost all aspects of life–politics, work, cultural pursuits, our education, and our hobbies–without ever encountering God or religion. Several hundred years ago, one would have found God suffused in all these activities. Our everyday institutions were saturated by God. In another sense, when people in the West talk about secularity, they mean a decline in religious practice itself. There are more unbelievers and atheists and fewer of the faithful. Church attendance has declined. Various religious sects are struggling to maintain relevance and stay afloat financially.
But part of what makes Taylor's book interesting and insightful but also difficult to grasp is his refusal to hew too narrowly to what he would consider the material or immanent aspects of religious faith. And so he's less interested in the idea of secularity as it relates to church attendance or its penetration into our working or political lives but in secularity as it relates to a worldview that we neither consciously choose or even recognize. He is interested in what he calls “the conditions of belief”:
The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of 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. [...] It wouldn’t matter if one showed that the statistics for church/synagogue attendance in the U.S., or some regions of it, approached those for Friday mosque attendance in, say, Pakistan or Jordan (or this, plus daily prayer). That would be evidence towards classing these societies as the same in sense 2. Nevertheless, it seems to me evident that there are big differences between these societies in what it is to believe, stemming in part from the fact that belief is an option, and in some sense an embattled option in the Christian (or “post-Christian”) society, and not (or not yet) in the Muslim ones.
[...]
[T]he 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. [...] Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place. By ‘context of understanding’ here, I mean both matters that will probably have been explicitly formulated by almost everyone, such as the plurality of options, and some which form the implicit, largely unfocussed background of this experience and search, its “pre-ontology”, to use a Heideggerian term.
Charles Taylor tells us in the Preface that he is "telling a story, that of what we usually call 'secularization' in the modern West. And in doing so, I am trying to clarify what this process, often invoked, but still not very clear, amounts to. To do this properly, I should have had to tell a denser and more continuous story, something I have neither the time nor competence to do."
I want to use this quote to take a brief digression on what I found most frustrating about this book. The book is infuriatingly meandering. It has unhelpful chapter titles like Dilemmas I and Dilemmas II. He coins lots of neologisms like the Age of Mobilization and the Nova Effect to describe certain aspects of our secularizing society that are catchy enough to remember but that he describes in such a way that I’m never able to concisely summarize the ideas they’re supposed to represent.
The best analogy I can come up with is that it's like helping your aging grandfather clean out his basement. He knows a lot about what's in there. There are sparkling moments of insight into another life and another world as each old piece of junk he picks up one evokes another tale of hard-earned wisdom. But it’s not very organized. He hits the same points again and again, and though each time he might add another epiphanous bit of insight and detail, it’s exceedingly difficult to keep track of. He makes references to events and people as if you too were also intimately familiar with them.
That’s kind of what it is like to read Taylor’s book. When he mentions Charles Péguy, he simply refers to him as Péguy (without a first name) and offers no explanation of who this person is. When he does finally refer to him by his full name, he still only describes him as a “paradigm example of a modern who has found his own path.”
There is obviously a rough chronological order. Taylor starts around 1200 AD and ends in our present-day society, but a lot can still go wrong.
For example:
Telling the story can’t be elided; but it isn’t sufficient of itself. In fact, the whole discussion has to tack back and forth between the analytical and the historical. And at this point I want to start by laying out some broad features of the contrast between then and now, which will be filled in and enriched by the story. They fall in the range of the three big negative changes I alluded to above, but I’ll be proceeding from last to first, and in fact I want to mention five changes.
Why didn’t he just start by saying there are five changes and “allude” to them in the order he would ultimately describe them in more detail?
One more example: In Chapter 6, he refers to something called the fourfold eclipse. As I come across this term, I’m confused about what four things he’s referring to, so I go back to the beginning of the chapter and see that he starts by telling us he’ll be describing three facets and I think, oh this is just Taylor being Taylor. He changed the name and added a fourth thing at some point later. But no, these are actually distinct numberings of distinct things. The fourfold eclipse is part of the first of the three facets. And when he’s actually talking about each of these eclipses in detail, he refers to them as anthropocentric shifts which probably explains why I was confused when he referred to them collectively as a fourfold eclipse later on.
The whole book is kind of like this.
Sorry, this is the last one. He numbers sections, sometimes he doesn't number sections, and sometimes he includes a helpful Rosetta Stone so you can translate between his different numbering systems:
The first is disenchantment, the undoing of obstacle 3 above to unbelief (I). Then entering the terrain of obstacle 2 (II), I want also to look at the way in which earlier society held certain profound tensions in equilibrium (III). This in turn was linked to a common understanding of time, which has since been done away with (IV). And lastly, I want to deal with the erosion of obstacle 1, in the way in which the old idea of cosmos has been replaced by the modern neutral universe (V).
But I wanted to include this final quote because Taylor spends a considerable amount of time describing what he sees as four essential pillars supporting our pre-modern worldview. And it is the slow destruction of these pillars that eventually lead us not simply to reject this worldview in favor of something else but to cease being able to understand it at all.
Enchantment: Over time, individuals lost what he calls an "enchanted" worldview. In an enchanted world meaning exists outside and independent of one's subjective experience and interpretation of them. Floods, earthquakes, and fires were the acts of a malevolent or angry God whose machinations remained necessarily inscrutable. We pray not just to God, but the saints, and we visit their shrines and sacred sites.There is magic and holy objects and relics that housed this magic, and one simply accepted this as a fact about the nature of human experience. This sense of the enchanted is closely related to another concept which he calls the "porous" (as opposed to the "buffered") self. The "porous" self had a locus of meaning that was both inside and outside the mind. Gods acted on the world in mysterious ways and this imbued events with meaning regardless of how we might feel or prefer to interpret them. Taylor will later use this idea of the "buffered" self to explain why we became more comfortable with the modern worldview.
These extra-human agencies are perhaps not so strange to us. They violate the second point of the modern outlook I mentioned above, viz., that (as we ordinarily tend to believe) the only minds in the cosmos are humans; but they nevertheless seem to offer a picture of minds, somewhat like ours, in which meanings, in the form of benevolent or malevolent intent can reside.
But seeing things this way understates the strangeness of the enchanted world. Thus precisely in this cult of the saints, we can see how the forces here were not all agents, subjectivities, who could decide to confer a favour. But power also resided in things.2 For the curative action of saints was often linked to centres where their relics resided; either some piece of their body (supposedly), or some object which had been connected with them in life, like (in the case of Christ), pieces of the true cross, or the sweat-cloth which Saint Veronica had used to wipe his face, and which was on display on certain occasions in Rome. And we can add to this other objects which had been endowed with sacramental power, like the Host, or candles which had been blessed at Candlemas, and the like. These objects were loci of spiritual power; which is why they had to be treated with care, and if abused could wreak terrible damage.
Another passage:
The High Renaissance theory of the correspondences, which while more an élite than a popular belief, partakes of the same enchanted logic, is full of such causal links mediated by meaning. Why does mercury cure venereal disease? Because this is contracted in the market, and Hermes is the God of markets. This way of thinking is totally different from our post-Galilean, mind-centred disenchantment. If thoughts and meanings are only in our minds, then there can be no “charged” objects, and the causal relations between things cannot be in any way dependent on their meanings, which must be projected on them from ourminds. In other words, the physical world, outside the mind, must proceed by causal laws which in no way turn on the moral meanings things have for us.
Chaos: The second is the acceptance of anti-structure or the shifting equilibrium between chaos and order. The pre-modern peasant saw himself within an order composed also of nobles and the clergy and to which he was subordinate. This was the way of things, and there wasn't much to be done about it. But occasionally, this sense of order was inverted. The peasants made fun of kings, dressed as clergy, and imposed chaos on this well-accepted order. Celebrations, like carnival, acted as a safety valve and served as an acceptance of chaos and our inability to entirely extirpate it.
[O]rder binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order. Although the effort to maintain order against chaos could not but in the end weaken, tire, unless this order were replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength. Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear. [...]
It incorporates some sense of the complementarity, the mutual necessity of opposites, that is, of states which are antithetical, can’t be lived at the same time. Of course, we all live this at some level: we work for x hours, relax for y hours, sleep for z hours. But what is unsettling to the modern mind is that the complementarity behind carnival exists on the moral or spiritual level. We’re not just dealing with a de facto incompatibility, like that of sleeping and watching television at the same time. We’re dealing with things which are enjoined and those condemned, with the licit and illicit, order and chaos. All the above accounts have this in common, that they postulate a world, and underlying this perhaps a cosmos, in which order needs chaos, in which we have to give place to contradictory principles.
Time: The third was a more nuanced and complex sense of time. History did not simply exist as a series of ordinary events that happened in the past, but as something that could be, depending on context, closer or further from everyday experience. Religious festivals and ceremonies brought certain historical events of religious significance, out of time, and close at hand. I found his descriptions here somewhat confusing and the destruction of our pre-modern conception of time does not figure as prominently in the book as, for example, our slow loss of enchantment.
“Secular” time is what to us is ordinary time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period. One thing happens after another, and when something is past, it’s past. Time placings are consistently transitive. If A is before B and B before C, then A is before C. The same goes if we quantify these relations: if A is long before B, and B long before C, then A is very long before C.
Now higher times gather and re-order secular time. [...] Events which were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked. [...] for instance the sacrifice of Isaac and the Crucifixion of Christ. These two events were linked through their immediate contiguous places in the divine plan. They are drawn close to identity in eternity, even though they are centuries (that is, “aeons” or “saecula”) apart. In God’s time there is a sort of simultaneity of sacrifice and Crucifixion.
Similarly, Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997. Once events are situated in relation to more than one kind of time, the issue of time-placing becomes quite transformed. Why are higher times higher? The answer is easy for the eternity which Europe inherits from Plato and Greek philosophy. The really real, full being is outside of time, unchanging. Time is a moving image of eternity. It is imperfect, or tends to Imperfection.
[...]
[U]nlike our ancestors, we tend to see our lives exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time. I don’t mean, once again, that people don’t believe in, say, God’s eternity. Many do. But the imbrication of secular in higher times is no longer for many people today a matter of common, “naïve” experience, something not yet a candidate for belief or disbelief because it is just obviously there; as it was for pilgrims at Compostela or Canterbury in the fourteenth century. (And as it may be today for many at Czéstachowa and Guadalupe; our secular age has geographical and social as well as temporal boundaries.)
Hierarchical Complementarity: The final aspect of pre-modern life is an accepted hierarchy, previously mentioned, of nobles, peasants, and clergy, each with their own important but definitely hierarchical roles.There was a great Chain of Being derived from a Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about an ordered cosmos, where we each had a place that was difficult or impossible to transcend. Though there was a clear hierarchy, there was also a sense that no matter where we were, we served an integral role.This lent a sense of acceptance of inequality and a clear idea of one’s role within society.
Now without overlooking these points of tension, we can read mediaeval Catholicism in one way as incorporating a kind of equilibrium based on hierarchical complementarity. This was certainly recognized as an organizing principle for the society as a whole. For instance, the famous formula: the clergy pray for all, the lords defend all, the peasants labour for all, encapsulates the idea that society is organized in complementary functions, which nevertheless are of unequal dignity. Similarly, the celibate vocations can be seen as higher, and undeniably the sacerdotal ones were so seen; but this doesn’t prevent them balancing the other, lower modes of life in a functional whole.
What this means is that there is in principle a place for something less than the highest vocation and aspirations. The tension resolves into an equilibrium.We’ll see in a minute that this was not the whole truth of the late Middle Ages, but it was part of it.
Taylor says that over the ensuing 500 years every aspect of this worldview, or "social imaginary" as he calls it, was destroyed. Who destroyed it?
The elites of course.
II. Oh the places elites go
According to Charles Taylor, for about 1000 years following the fall of the Roman Empire and the triumph of Christianity, we lived in this previously described enchanted world. There was a God, but he was not like the God of believers today. He did not present himself to us personally through individual prayer and devotion but interceded in the actual world around us. It was a world of miracles, magic, and “acts of God” (rather than natural disasters.) His immanence resided in the sacred relics of the parish church and the rituals we practiced as a community.
One example Taylor gives of this religiously saturated sense of community is the tradition of “beating the bounds”:
This kind of collective ritual action, where the principal agents are acting on behalf of a community, which also in its own way becomes involved in the action, seems to figure virtually everywhere in early religion, and continues in some ways up till our day. Certainly it goes on occupying an important place as long as people live in an enchanted world, as I remarked earlier in the discussion of disenchantment. The ceremony of “beating the bounds” of the agricultural village, for instance, involved the whole parish, and could only be effective as a collective act of this whole.4
This embedding in social ritual usually carries with it another feature. Just because the most important religious action was that of the collective, and because it often required that certain functionaries—priests, shamans, medicine men, diviners, chiefs, etc.—fill crucial roles in the action, the social order in which these roles were defined tended to be sacrosanct. This is, of course, the aspect of religious life which was most centrally identified and pilloried by the radical Enlightenment.
I’ll briefly note that another gripe I had throughout the book is the lack of depth in the examples he provides. He mentions “beating the bounds” a number of times, but really gives no better explanation of it than the quote above. I had to refer to Wikipedia to find out that it was a way for community members to understand the boundaries of their parish in the absence of easily available maps. I would say that overall, Taylor mostly fails to acknowledge the material reasons that often seemed to underlie many of his examples. And as someone completely enmeshed in a modern “social imaginary” that really emphasizes the materialist explanations for things, I would have appreciated greater treatment of these, even if he ultimately emphasized the transcendental or spiritual aspects. What role did the Black Death play, the Hundred Years War? The printing press? Taylor doesn’t really mention these things at all. The Protestant Reformation? That phrase only appears four times in the entire book.
But for reasons even Taylor cannot quite put his finger on, on or about 1200 AD, the world changed. The elites become interested in holding the laity to a higher standard. They need to go to confession. They need to participate in communion. Church officials send mendicant friars who are more educated than parish clergy to inculcate a higher standard of practice.
Faith and religiosity begin to focus more on death and judgment and less on fun festivals where townspeople walk around the perimeter of their parish and slap things with sticks. They needed to stop worshiping relics so much. It was also a shift toward individualism. People needed to stop hitting things with sticks and worshiping sweat-cloths so that they could focus on not sinning and avoiding their own eternal damnation.
The masses found this all kind of stressful. They demanded something to alleviate their anxiety. The church provided indulgences.
A counter-elite formed who considered the sale of these indulgences immoral and base. They took this more individualistic religiosity seriously and, via the Reformation, transcended the tension between judgment and good conduct by focusing on faith. They recast God not as judge but as savior. The hierarchy complementarity that involved the peasant, the nobility, and the clergy fulfilling their pre-ordained and immutable functions was eradicated intellectually and religiously if not socially. The clergy were not more worthy of praise than the peasants.. No vocation was inherently better than any other, and all could bring glory to God if you put a sort of asceticism, effort, prudence, and dignity in them. The spiritual and secular realms collapsed into one another.
Charles Taylor describes some of this elite scorn for the commoner’s faith by quoting Erasmus who he says “was repelled by the sheerly interested nature of much popular piety”:
There are those who worship certain heavenly powers with special rites. One
salutes Christopher daily, though only when he sees his image, because he has
persuaded himself that on such days he will be insured against an evil death.
Another worships St Roch—but why? Because he thinks to drive away the
plague. Another mumbles prayers to Barbara or George, lest they fall into the
hands of an enemy. This man vows to Apollonia to fast in order to escape
toothache; that one gazes on the image of St Job to get rid of the itch. Some
give part of their profits to the poor in order to keep their business from mishap;
some light candles to Jerome to restore a business already bad.
And so the first half of the book maps out a steadily intensifying cycle of attempted reforms with periodic regressions toward laxity but in which the trend is one where the elite work to establish norms of discipline, orderliness, and religious devotion not just among the clergy but among the laity as well.
Why was all this happening? Taylor gives frustratingly little space to the historical events that underlie some of these changes, but this is what he says:
[W]hat is remarkable is how, gathering pace in the sixteenth century in the wake of the Reforms, and then continuing at higher intensities, attempts are undertaken to make over the lower orders. They are precisely not left as they are, but badgered, bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled and organized to abandon their lax and disordered folkways and conform to one or another feature of civil behaviour. At the beginning, of course, there is no thought of making them over utterly to meet the full ideal; but nor did it seem acceptable just to leave them as they were. And by the end of this process, we enter a world, ours, where everyone among us is supposed to be “civilized”.
Why this pro-active stance? The motivation seems complex. One strand is readily understandable on the part of any élite anywhere: the people had to be disciplined because their disorder threatened the élite. This seems particularly evident in the brace of reforms of what were called in England the “poor laws”, whereby the conditions of relief for the indigent were strictly defined, begging forbidden or severely restricted, vagabondage outlawed, etc. It would appear that a rise in population, coupled with more difficult economic conditions in the sixteenth century, meant that the number of indigent increased; and their mobility did as well, as they gravitated to larger cities in search of the aid and sustenance they could no longer find at home. This larger, destitute and mobile population brought about conditions which were threatening to public order, facilitating crime and the spread of disease. The attempts to control relief, stop free-lance begging, prevent people from moving, can perhaps be understood as a response to these threats.
Later on, however, the motivation shifts from this negative concern to a positive one. The reform of society comes to be seen as an essential part of statecraft, as crucial to the maintenance and increase of state power. This comes with the dawning realization, first, that governmental action can help to improve economic performance, and second, that this performance was the essential precondition of military power.
And Taylor is also quick to emphasize that both the secular need for order and civility and the religious need for piety and devotion were mutually reinforcing and interacting:
In other words, the good order of civility, and the good order of piety, didn’t remain in separate uncommunicating compartments. They to some extent merged, and inflected each other. The drive to piety, to bring all real Christians (which were, of course, a minority, the saved, and didn’t include the foreknown to damnation, even if they were nominally members of the Church) up to the fully Godly life, inflects the agenda of social reform, and gives it a universalist-philanthropic thrust. And the demands of civility, which entailed some reordering of society, in turn give a new social dimension to the pious, ordered life.
Science during this time is not so much a revelation about the true secular nature of the world, but serves new religious purposes. There are fewer mysteries because God has given us reason with which we can investigate and come to understand his creation. Our present secular society was not so much sloughing off false beliefs, but actually arose from these attempts to elevate the piety of the masses, to get them to understand the benefits of a civilized society and the ways that this fit in with God's plan for the world. We serve him by understanding his creation and bringing it closer to the perfectibility which he embodies.
The idea that Taylor is trying to get at here is, as best as I can summarize, the following: This idea of God became less and less a part of the physical world. I think Taylor would argue that even my phrasing in that last sentence–the “idea of God”–reflects a modern worldview. That in the past, God wasn’t simply an idea “in the head” but something with bodily consequences. He mentions the close association between physical sickness and sin, the framework of insanity as possession rather than mental illness. It seemed more and more remote from our everyday experience. Over generations and through cycles of intensifying faith and regression, God went from being viewed as almost a part of our bodily, material, and social world, to one in which it was seen as a largely personal relationship and devotion (which often simultaneously intensified religious belief) to a God who was responsible for organizing the world but other than getting things started, generally stayed out of worldly affairs (Deism).
The crucial shift occurred when not only had God come to be viewed as essentially distinct and outside worldly affairs but humanity increasingly saw themselves as masters of their own domain. They had success raising the bar of the masses, civilizing themselves and others, creating some semblance of order and security through determined effort. While this success might initially have been attributed to God’s grace, or be seen as a reflection of carrying out his will to create a more perfect world, it wasn’t so far-fetched to begin thinking that we might be able to achieve these things without God at all. And, to many, a more direct focus on the goal of human flourishing would lead to more human flourishing than a focus on bringing God’s vision of the world to reality or upholding his standards with human flourishing as a positive but secondary side-effect.
And this leads directly to what Taylor calls exclusive humanism. In his view, this is a more complicated story than one of faith simply receding before reason. For a while there was actually an intensifying faith, certainly among Puritans, Calvinists, and the various Evangelical movements in the United States. These were not the last dying gasps of religiosity on the run, a sort of costly signaling where people knowingly stake out increasingly bizarre and untenable positions to better identify members of their tribe, but in many ways a natural consequence of many of the changes and increased scientific understanding that were taking place. The focus on personal faith during the Protestant Reformation was not the last refuge of the faithful masses who could no longer maintain their belief in miracles and magic in the face of Enlightenment but genuinely seen as the route to a closer relationship with God. An understanding of evolution was not, initially, the death knell for religious faith but a way toward deeper faith through an understanding of God’s orderliness and the world he created for us.
But this set the stage for a shift where we began to see the human flourishing we might bring about as the product of human ingenuity alone. And that the contemplation of orderly nature alone is enough inspiration.
And so exclusive humanism could take hold, as more than a theory held by a tiny minority, but as a more and more viable spiritual outlook. There needed two conditions for its appearance: the negative one, that the enchanted world fade; and also the positive one, that a viable conception of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations arise such that we could conceive of doing without God in acknowledging and pursuing them. This came about in the ethic of imposed order (which also played an essential role in disenchantment), and in an experience with this ethic which made it seem possible to rely exclusively on intra-human powers to carry it through. The points at which God had seemed an indispensable source for this ordering power were the ones which began to fade and become invisible. The hitherto unthought became thinkable.
But these changes weren’t accepted with completely open arms, even among the elites. Many felt that this focus on good order and benevolence missed something essential about the human experience. The Romantics worried about a loss of appreciation for the human spirit, creativity, and greatness and sought it through art and an appreciation of nature. He sees individuals like Thomas Carlyle as Godless but nevertheless needing to "rescue some sense of the human potential for spiritual/moral ascent, in face of the degrading theory and practice of utlitarian-commercial-industrial society." Nietsche feels that this secular benevolence and exclusive humanism leads to pusillanimity and tries to reaffirm something of the warrior ethos, the ability to place reputation and honor above life itself.
These counter trends reflect a continuing sense even into the present day that life has lost some essential dimension of meaning. He quotes Matthew Arnold::
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged my faith, and trimmed its fire,
Showed me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce my gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
III. Why?
If I can distill down what my interest in the book is and what I think Charles Taylor, in his very erudite but meandering way, is trying to address, is what is happening at an experiential and perceptual level as an entire society’s worldview changes. And I think I would summarize it by saying that within a perceptual worldview certain intellectual moves are possible. But that these intellectual moves will remain purely intellectual or theoretical until there is some sort of attached moral, ethical, emotional incentive that allows them to be more widely adopted at which point it can alter or shift wider society’s perceptual worldview. This altered perceptual worldview then becomes the background for further intellectual moves.
One example of this that seemed particularly explicit is where he talks about Matthew Tindal, a Deist author in the early 18th century. Taylor is trying to describe the ways in which God becomes almost a vestigial organ as shifting from a place of centrality inone’s life, world, and community to something increasingly less relevant.
Now the first anthropocentric shift comes with the eclipse of this sense of further purpose; and hence of the idea that we owe God anything further than the realization of his plan. Which means fundamentally that we owe him essentially the achievement of our own good. This was formulated by Tindal in his Christianity as Old as the Creation, a title which itself reflects the third facet of Deism, the appeal to an original natural religion. For Tindal, God’s purposes for us are confined to the encompassing of “the common Interest, and mutual Happiness of his rational Creatures.”
Now Tindal was an extreme case, and not many agreed with his book when it came out in the early eighteenth century. Tindal went all the way, while I am talking about a trend here. But Tindal was far from alone in giving voice to this trend. [...]
But beyond those who subscribed to these unambiguous formulations, even people who held to orthodox beliefs were influenced by this humanizing trend; frequently the transcendent dimension of their faith became less central.
Tindal takes an idea to its logical conclusions. He bites the bullet. No one really takes this seriously but perhaps he widens some intellectual understanding of what’s possible. And so change happens not at the individual level but at the societal level. As the next generation arrives, perhaps these ideas seem less novel and edgy and more like a background understanding. Perhaps certain practices have emerged that make these insights easier to appreciate or incorporate. At the societal level we lose a certain status quo bias that keeps us chained to tradition, but I think that Taylor would argue that we also lose some sort of tacit, experiential understanding of the world as it was and what it felt like to live in it. To truly understand someone’s ideas we would need to understand the context in which it was proposed, and that context is already gone.
And I think his claim is that it is our current “social imaginary” our set of values and ways of conceptualizing the world that make things like atheism seem reasonable and feel like rational choices even when they may not be. Scientific materialism has a certain appeal that is about more than its intellectual rigor. It's not the technical arguments that convince but the emotions that satisfy. And scientific materialism offered alongside its rational proofs, a sort of promise of hard-nosed sobriety, a sense of maturity, of being able to deal with difficult truths to those that embraced it. There needed to be socially, a culture that attaches this kind of emotional valence to particular ideas. It’s not that science appears more true but that faith appears more childish. And so we shouldn’t view a societal turn towards science and secularity as inevitable but as a function of certain emotional rewards that society began to provide in exchange for accepting it. And once the exchange is made, the demands of the new scientific ethic take over and we retrospectively justify it with ‘proofs’.
He gives some historical examples. He notes that the Protestant Reformation really didn't spark until Luther challenged church hierarchy with the idea of salvation by faith. And that the crucial aspect was the emotional valence rather than whatever rational critiques were made:
"But the important point is that in propounding salvation by faith, Luther was touching on the nevralgic issue of his day, the central concern and fear, which dominated so much lay piety, and drove the whole indulgences racket, the issue of judgment, damnation, salvation. In raising his standard on this issue, Luther was on to something which could move masses of people, unlike the humanist critique of mass piety, or the rejection of the sacred." (75)
He continues:
And in taking it up, Luther operated another reversal of the field of fear, analogous to that involved in denying church magic. The sale of indulgences was driven by a fear of punishment. But Luther's message was that we are all sinners, and deserve punishment. Salvation involves facing and accepting this fully. Only in facing our full sinfulness, can we throw ourselves on the mercy of God, by which alone we are justified. "Who fears Hell runs towards it". We have to face down our fears, and this transmutes them into confidence in the saving power of God.
This is interesting, because you can imagine parallels today. There are many rational critiques of certain shibboleths by economists, rationalists, YIMBYs etc. But what is their equivalent of salvation by faith?
He sees these imaginaries as independent of truth and I admit that it is difficult for me to quite get into this mindset. I mean, I actually believe that hurricanes and earthquakes are natural disasters and not acts of God. What does it feel like to not think this is the natural explanation? One analog I could think of is perhaps our contemporary views of mental illness or a locus of control. The idea of someone having an internal versus external locus of control is less a matter of fact but of one’s stance toward sense experience. And though it certainly seems like there’s more of a factual basis to our ideas about mental illness, I'm reminded of a post by Scott where he talks about cross-cultural perceptions of things like PTSD. I think science would say PTSD is a real thing but I think there's another sense in which it's a complicated phenomena that emerges from certain ways we are socialized and learn to interpret our own experiences.
Like all vexing problems of epistemology and subjective experience, Taylor thinks Heidegger has something useful to say:
Our grasp of the world does not consist simply of our holding inner representations of outer reality. We do hold such representations, which are perhaps best understood in contemporary terms as sentences held true. But these only make the sense that they do for us because they are thrown up in the course of an ongoing activity of coping with the world, as bodily, social and cultural beings. This coping can never be accounted for in terms of representations, but provides the background against which our representations have the sense that they do. (2) As just implied, this coping activity, and the understanding which inhabits it, is not primarily that of each of us as individuals; rather we are each inducted into the practices of coping as social “games” or activities; some of which do indeed, in the later stages of development, call upon us to assume a stance as individuals. But primordially, we are part of social action. (3) In this coping, the things which we deal with are not first and foremost objects, but what Heidegger calls “pragmata”, things which are the focal points of our dealings, which therefore have relevance, meaning, significance for us, not as an add-on but from their first appearance in our world. Later, we learn to stand back, and consider things objectively, outside of the relevances of coping.
Taylor's "social imaginary" is an important concept and I think contains the crux of his argument. There is a context for interaction, certain assumptions we make about how the world works and how people work, and we not only expect other people to also hold these assumptions but engage in a great deal of social interaction based on the assumption that others are also assuming the same thing, and we mostly try to get by without examining these assumptions and without thinking about them consciously at all. And that the process of social transformation is not about any one individual spontaneously choosing to examine his social imaginary or his social milieu or actively seeking out evidence why it might be wrong but the process over successive generations of elite ideas slowly seeping in. Ideas about the economy, the public sphere, or individual sovereignty start off as theories but gradually penetrate, interact with, and transform these social imaginaries.
This is how Taylor views our ideas about individualism:
Individualism is the normal fruit of human self regard absent the illusory claims of God, the Chain of Being, or the sacred order of society. In other words, we moderns behave as we do because we have “come to see” that certain claims were false—or on the negative reading, because we have lost from view certain perennial truths. What this view reads out of the picture is the possibility that Western modernity might be powered by its own positive visions of the good, that is, by one constellation of such visions among available others, rather than by the only viable set left after the old myths and legends have been exploded. …The analogy should be evident between the moral death of God story, and its science-driven stable-mate, as well as epistemology. All make a crucial move which they present as a “discovery”, something we “come to see” when certain conditions are met. In all cases, this move only looks like a discovery within the frame of a newly constructed understanding of ourselves, our predicament and our identity. The element of “discovery” seems unchallengeable, because the underlying construction is pushed out of sight and forgotten. In terms of my discussion a few pages ago, all these accounts “naturalize” the features of the modern, liberal identity. They cannot see it as one, historically constructed understanding of human agency among others.
IV. Archimedes Chronophone, revisited:
Describing the modern worldview that is neutral, objective, disinterested:
From within itself, the epistemological picture seems unproblematic. It comes across as an obvious discovery we make when we reflect on our perception and acquisition of knowledge. All the great foundational figures: Descartes, Locke, Hume, claimed to be just saying what was obvious once one examined experience itself reflectively. Seen from the deconstruction, this is a most massive self-blindness. Rather what happened is that experience was carved into shape by a powerful theory which posited the primacy of the individual, the neutral, the intra-mental as the locus of certainty. What was driving this theory? Certain “values”, virtues, excellences: those of the independent, disengaged subject, reflexively controlling his own thought processes, “self-responsibly” in Husserl’s famous phrase. There is an ethic here, of independence, self-control, self-responsibility, of a disengagement which brings control; a stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses. The entire picture, shot through with “values”, which is meant to emerge out of the careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny, is now presented as having been there from the beginning, driving the whole process of “discovery”.21” (559)
Eliezer Yudkowsky once described a rationalist thought experiment that he called Archimedes’ Chronophone. The idea is this:
Wouldn’t it have been so much better for humanity if we had simply advanced a little more quickly along the moral and technological frontier? If we’d decided slavery was bad thousands of years ago instead of hundreds, if the Greeks had finished their steam engine, if the Egyptians had discovered the scientific method?
Imagine that Archimedes had invented a temporal telephone that would relay your speech from 2022 to his time in 250 BC but with one catch: everything you say is translated such that it doesn’t preserve your literal speech but the cognitive map that underlies it. If you want to tell Archimedes that slavery is bad, it is easy for you in 2022 to come up with all many of justifications that come instantly to mind. But what Archimedes hears is that slavery is great because it is right and natural that certain men should rule over others.
The idea is that what is transmitted are the intellectual strategies that underlie one’s statements rather than the statements themselves. In contemporary culture, slavery is considered universally reprehensible because we take as axiomatic a person’s right to dignity and autonomy, etc., etc. Similarly, in the culture of Archimedes, slavery was considered sensible and mostly unquestioned because *insert whatever easily available justifications come to mind that weren’t arrived at through individual effort and skeptical exploration but through received wisdom and cultural osmosis*.
What you need instead is the intellectual strategy that turns a person in Archimedes’ time from pro-slavery to anti-slavery. They couldn’t have known the answer in advance as we do, so how did it happen?
I think Charles Taylor’s book tries to give an answer to that. I think he would say it’s something that’s both intellectual and emotional. It’s a little bit of elitist contempt coupled with an intellectual need for logical coherence. But that it’s also short-sightedness and cognitive bias. That we often fail to understand the full implications of our ideas because we operate within a social milieu that is never questioned because we don’t even realize it is something that we can question. That the only way to change the world is to put our stake in the ground so that when the next generation comes, they see us not as interlopers but as part of the background of their experience and worldview. And that whatever we do, it will have implications we cannot possibly anticipate in advance.