A Secular Age
Encyclopedia
A Secular Age is a book written by the philosopher Charles Taylor
which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press
. The sociologist Robert Bellah has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."
In recent years, secularism
has become an important topic in the humanities
and social sciences. Although there continue to be important disagreements among scholars, many begin with the premise that secularism is not simply the absence of religion
, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as an historical construction.
In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a state in which it is almost impossible not to believe in God
, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. He argues against the view that secularity in society is caused by the rise of science
and reason
. He argues that this view is far too simplistic and does not explain why people would abandon their faith
.
In his previous work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
, Taylor focuses on the developments which led to the identity of modern individuals in the West. This work focuses on the developments which led to modern social structures. The content of Sources of the Self is complementary to A Secular Age.
Three modes of secularity are distinguished: one, secularized public spaces, two, the decline of belief and practice and three, cultural conditions where unbelief in religion
is a viable option. This text focuses on secularity three.
Up until a few hundred years ago, the common viewpoint of the North Atlantic was basically Christian
. Most people could not even consider a viewpoint without God. The culture has changed so that multiple viewpoints are now conceivable to most people.
Taylor starts with a description of the Middle Ages
and presents the changes to bring about the modern secular age. The Middle Ages were a time of enchantment
. People believed in God, angels, demons, witches, the Church's sacrament
s, relic
s, and sacred places. Each of these types of things had mysterious, real effects on individuals and society.
The early Middle Ages
were content to have two speeds for people's spiritual development. The clergy
and a few others were at the faster, more intense speed. Everyone else was only expected to plod along at a slower spiritual speed. The High Middle Ages
had a strong focus on bringing everyone along to a higher realm of spirituality and life.
Deism
is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God
and the modern secular age. This change is accomplished through three major facets of Deism: one, an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature
as primarily for people, two, the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established, and three, the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone.
Taylor discussed the political implications of A Secular Age in an interview with The Utopian.
Taylor does not believe that the decline in belief occurred because "'Darwin
refuted the Bible", as allegedly said by a Harrow
schoolboy in the 1890s." So he wants to discuss belief and unbelief "not as rival theories... but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other[.]"(p5) Where is the place of richness or fullness, and its opposite, the place of absence or exile? There is also the "middle condition," the daily activities between the extremes, and their meaning.
For believers the place of fullness is God. For unbelievers it is within, the power of reason (Enlightenment
) or Nature, or our inner depths (Romanticism
). Also, postmodernism
wants to stand outside reason and sentiment, on the idea that fullness is a projection that cannot be found.
In the old world people could have a naive belief, but today belief or unbelief is "reflective," and includes a knowledge that other people do not/do believe. We look over our shoulder at other beliefs, but we still each live a "background," with our beliefs "held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted... tacit... because never formulated."(p13)
Rejecting the "subtraction" theory of secularization, Taylor believes that a movement of Reform in Christianity
, aiming to raise everyone up to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice, caused the move to secularization. The disciplined Reformed self replaced the "porous" self, vulnerable to external forces, spirits and demons, with a new "buffered" self, a disciplined and free agent living in a progressively disenchanted world.
The success of Reform and the propagation of successful disciplined selves leads to a disciplinary society that starts to take action against rowdiness and indiscipline: controlling the poor, taming the warrior aristocracy, suppressing "feasts of misrule" like Carnival
. Calvinists and Puritans were "industrious, disciplined... mutually predictable... With such men a safe, well-ordered society can be built."(p106) The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism.(p130) "So disengaged discipline frames a new experience of the self as having a telos of autarky."(p138)
Early humans were embedded into the world in three ways: into their small-scale social group in which religious ritual was identical with social ritual; into the cosmos, the enchanted world of spirits and forces; and the cosmos into the divine, so that the gods are intimately involved with the project of human flourishing. Thus: "Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine."(p152)
This embedding is broken, for an elite, by the "higher" religions of the Axial Age
. Humans are individuals, no longer embedded in society, God is no longer embedded in the cosmos, but separate, and the notion of human flourishing becomes transformed, e.g., in "a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing."(p152) In the Reformation and after this disembedding extended more and more from the elite to the whole population.
More and more, in recent times: "Humans are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit."(p159) This modern social imaginary
is the Modern Moral Order, and it is a radical break with the two pre-modern moral orders, the idea of "the Law of a people"(p163) or the organization of society "around a notion of hierarchy in society which expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos."(p163)
Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding."(p176) "They are, respectively (1) the "economy", (2) the public sphere, and (3) the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule."(p176) Both the economy and the public sphere are conceived as existing independent of the political power. In the notion of economy is the "invisible hand" and the exchange of advantages in a relationship of interlocking causes. The state becomes "the orchestrating power that can make an economy flourish."(p178)
This new moral order is no longer a society of "mediated access" where the subjects are held together by an apex, a King, "We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one, from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct-access societies."(p209)
Taylor anticipates that his approach might be attacked as "idealism" against the Marxian requirement of "materialism." But ideas and material conditions are inseparable. "'Ideas' always come in history wrapped up in certain practices[.]"(p213)
Christianity always provided for ordinary human flourishing, but included inscrutable divine grace. With Deism
grace became eclipsed, for people endowed with reason and benevolence need only these faculties to carry out God's plan. God's Providence
, once a mystery, is just God's plan. Eventually we come to Feuerbach: "that the potentialities we have attributed to God are really human potentialities."(p251)
Taylor makes a threefold claim. First, that "exclusive humanism arose in connection with, indeed, as an alternative set of moral sources for, the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit." Second, that "it couldn't have arisen in any other way at the time."(p259) Third, that today's wide range of unbelief still originates "in the ethic of beneficent order."
The usual interpretation of the changing understanding of God in recent centuries is a move from a "supreme being with powers... [of] agency and personality" to God as creator of a "law-governed structure" to "an indifferent universe, with God either indifferent or non-existent."(p270) This the subtraction story. Taylor thinks that it's more complicated than that.
The official Enlightenment story is that "people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition"(p273) to explain the world. The social order can be organized by rational codes, and human relationships which matter are prescribed in the codes. But the motive force behind this development was reformed Christianity and its move to a designer God in the early modern period.
In the new epistemic predicament, humans "acquire knowledge by exploring impersonal orders with the aid of disengaged reason."(p294) They form "societies under the normative provisions of the Modern Moral Order." In the secularist understanding, "human beings discover that they just are humans united in societies which can have no other normative principles but those of the MMO."(p294) "It is a massive shift in horizon."
But there are cross pressures. Against the freedom from "unreasoning fears" there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration; utilitarianism is thought too flat and shallow. There is no room for death.
Unbelief in the middle to late 19th century began to take up the profound new sense of the universe, its vastness in space and time, and in the lack of a plan. Taylor calls this the modern "cosmic imaginary" (the natural version of the modern "social imaginary"). "Our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere."(p325) Through the idea of the sublime and recovery of the "well-springs of sympathy"(p344) in Herder
and Rousseau
lost to disengaged reason we reach eventually the Will of Schopenhauer
. We experience a universe maybe without a "rational, benign plan", bottomless, and the "locus of our dark genesis."
This leads to the theories of Freud
, that the "highest functions, thinking, willing, are... the product of neuro-physiological functions in us."(p348) The new imaginary sustains a range of views, from "the hardest materialism through to Christian orthodoxy."(p351) This has confounded the war between belief and unbelief.
The opening up of different ways in experiencing the world includes a shift in the place of art. Instead of mimesis
, the retelling of the Christian world-view through its standard symbols and reference points, we have a creative art that must develop its own reference points. Artists "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words... In this 'subtler language'... something is defined and created as well as manifested."(p353) This applies to poetry, painting, and music taking an "absolute" turn, decoupled from story and representation. Yet they still move. But why? The mystery provides a place of the spiritual and the deep for the unbeliever.
Taylor invokes Schiller
and his notion of "beauty as an aid to being moral", a "stage of unity as a higher stage, beyond moralism" obtained through play, the way we "create and respond to beauty."(p358) It creates an unspecified space "between religious commitment and materialism."(p360)
In the 19th century two additional factors influenced people in renouncing their faith in God: advances and science and Biblical scholarship, and the new cosmic imaginary.
People came to feel that the "impersonal order of regularities" was a more mature standpoint than the faith in a personal God. The new cosmic imaginary of a universe vast in time and space also argued against "a personal God or benign purpose." A materialist view is adult; faith in a personal God is childish.
Another view is associated with Nietzsche
, the "post-Schopenhauerian" vision that notices the "irrational, amoral, even violent forces within us."(p369) These "cannot simply be condemned and uprooted, because our existence, and/or vitality, creativity, strength, ability to create beauty depend on them." This rebels against the Enlightenment
in a way that echoes the old aristocratic and warrior ethos, a "revolt from within unbelief... against the primacy of life"(p372) i.e., that "our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering... Life properly understood also affirms death and destruction."(p373)
Thus it is possible for people to live in a world encountering "no echo outside." This view experiences "its world entirely as immanent."(p376)
After a resurgence of belief driven by the Evangelical movement, by the 1830s elites began to experience again the cross-pressure between "the inescapable idea of an impersonal order"(p378) and the need to avoid a flattened world shorn of the values of Christianity. Carlyle
attempted his own faith in "the human potential for spiritual/moral ascent"(p380) in the face of "utilitarian-commercial-industrial society." In Matthew Arnold
this becomes a faith in culture, "the best that has been thought and said in the world."(p384) Darwin and evolution changed everything, but the "need to articulate something fuller, deeper"(p391) continues.
The high cultural trajectory was accompanied by the slow replacement of the vertical understanding of society into the modern horizontal idea of rights-bearing individuals related in mutual benefit, a combination of constitutional monarchy, rights and freedoms, Protestant religions, and British "decency", i.e., character and self-control. This strenuous ethic of belief set up "an unbelieving philosophy of self-control"(p395) in Leslie Stephen
and John Stuart Mill
, a "humanism of altruism and duty."(p398)
But this moralism provoked a rebellion by the young at the end of the century. It was too materialistic and too stifling. The new rebels were opposed not only to the "ethic of self control in its altruistic, public-spirited facet, but also in its individualistic, self-improving, "self-help" aspect."(p401) In one version, with G.M. Trevelyan, it teeters on the edge of the material/transcendent divide, in another, with Walter Pater
, it replaces the transcendent with aetheticism.
Bloomsbury
was another approach, an ethic of "personal relations and beautiful states of mind."(p405) It carried immanence another step, identifying the intrinsically valuable with the internal experience and sensibility. Then along came the World War I
. Here was a war fought for "civilization... the protection of life from violence through order and law."(p407) Yet the war was a "greater negation of civilized life than any foe threatened." Thus Pound's
notion of "a botched civilization" and Eliot's
"Waste Land
." For intellectuals it was impossible to inhabit the mental world of Rupert Brooke
. Educated people could not deploy images of dedication and patriotism without distance and irony. "The will was suspect"(p411) a "formula for destruction rather than virtue". We get to the post-war consensus
of an interventionist state. There is an option to believe that is wisely refused, and a confident, buffered identity.
The trajectory took different forms in the Catholic cultures. In particular in France the modern order of mutual benefit, in its Rousseau version, becomes Republican and anti-Christian if not always clearly atheist. The notion of humans as innocent and good requires a political order opposed to the Christian original sin
. The social imaginary "is grounded in exclusive humanism"(p412) and becomes radicalized in Marxist socialism. Opposed to this imaginary was "Reaction," a vertical hierarchy "where differences of rank were respected"(p413) and each had his place under monarchy, albeit justified by its beneficial consequences rather than an ontic logos.
An ideal order "stressing rights, liberties and democracy, squares off against a counter-ideal which stresses obedience, hierarchy, belonging to, even sacrifice."(p414) But there can be crossovers, with Comte
and a scientific "religion to provide social cohesion" and an unbelieving Nietzsche with heroes, suffering as an ineradicable dimension that "heroes learn to face and surmount".(p415) By 1912 Henri Massis
and Alfred de Tarde write of a generation of youth needing a new discipline to create order and hierarchy and commitment against the dilettante generation of 1885. This movement was shattered in World War I
. Many went into the war celebrating the opportunity for "heroism and dedication" only to be "sent wholesale to death in a long, mechanized slaughter."(p417)
The crisis of civilization dealt a body blow to established Christianity, and provoked "new, unbelieving variants of the vertical ideal of order"(p418) in fascism
and Nazism
. Thus the struggle between belief and unbelief "has been connected with ideals and counter-ideals of the moral order of society. But this conflict has disappeared, as religion has delinked from society into "a new kind of niche in society."(p419)
In France this process played out as a direct combat between the ancien régime
church and the secular Republicans in which the Church began organizing lay people in new bodies for fundraising, pilgrimages, and "Catholic Action
." In the Anglophone world this mobilization occurred through "denominations" (e.g. Methodists
) that "are like affinity groups"(p449), an organizing force to help people struggling to find their feet in the market economy.
But with the cultural revolution of the 1960s the age of mobilization came to an end, at least in the modern West. The last half century has seen a cultural revolution in the North Atlantic civilization. "As well as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms, we now have a widespread "expressive" individualism."(p473) Taylor calls this a culture of "authenticity," from the Romantic
expressivism that erupted in the late 18th century elite, "that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own."(p475)
This affects the social imaginary
. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people"(p481) is added a space of fashion, a culture of mutual display. The modern moral order of mutual benefit has been strengthened, mutual respect requires that "we shouldn't criticize each other's 'values'"(p484) in particular on sexual matters. Since "my" religious life or practice is my personal choice, my "link to the sacred" may not be embedded in "nation" or "church." This is a continuation of the Romantic move away from reason towards a "subtler language" (Shelley) to understand individual "spiritual insight/feeling." "Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self."(p489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order."(p492)
The revolution in sexual behavior has broken the culture of "moralism" that dominated most of the last half millennium. Developing individualism was bound to come into conflict with moralism, but in the mid 20th century the dam broke. Thinkers started to think of sexual gratification as good, or at least unstoppable, especially as "in cities, young people could pair off without supervision."(p501) Now people are not bound by moralism: "they form, break, then reform relationships;"(p496) they experiment.
It is a tragedy, however that "the codes which churches want to urge on people" still suffer from "the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues."(p503)
Today, the "neo-Durkheimian
embedding of religion in a state"(p505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism"(p506) has been called into question. People are asking, like Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" They are heirs of the expressive revolution, "seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self... of the body and its pleasures... The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality."(p507) This is often termed "spirituality" as opposed to "organized religion."
This has caused a breaking down of barriers between religious groups but also a decline in active practice and a loosening of commitment to orthodox dogmas. A move from an Age of Mobilization to an Age of Authenticity, it is a "retreat of Christendom." Fewer people will be "kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity,"(p514) although a core (vast in the US) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP."(p515)
Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag"(p515) spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, study group, pilgrimage, special prayer, etc. It will be "unhooked" from the paleo-Durkheimian sacralized society, the neo-Durkheimian national identity or center of "civilizational order" but still collective. "One develops a religious life."(p518)
While religious life continues many people retain a nominal tie with the church, particularly in Western Europe
. This "penumbra" seems to have diminished since 1960. More people stand outside belief, and no longer participate in rites of passage like church baptism and marriage. Yet people respond to, e.g. in France the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis
, or in Sweden the loss of a trans-Baltic ferry. Religion "remains powerful in memory; but also as a kind of reserve fund of spiritual force or consolation."(p522)
This distancing is not experienced in the United States
. This may be (1) because immigrants used church membership as a way to establish themselves: "Go to the church of your choice, but go."(p524) Or (2) it may be the difficulty that the secular elite has in imposing its "social imaginary" on the rest of society vis-a-vis hierarchical Europe. Also (3) the US never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the US have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God." There are less skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power."(p528) Finally (5) the US has provided experimental models of post-Durkheimian religion at least for a century.
After summarizing his argument, Taylor looks to the future, which might follow the slow reemergence of religion in Russia in people raised in the "wasteland" of militant atheism, but suddenly grabbed by God, or it might follow the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon in the west. "In any case, we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee."
There are several Closed World Structures that assume the immanent frame. One is the idea of the rational agent of modern epistemology. Another is the idea that religion is childish, so "An unbeliever has the courage to take up an adult stance and face reality."(p562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their world views, they "function as unchallenged axioms"(p590) and it just becomes very hard to understand why anyone would believe in God.
Living in the immanent frame "The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other".(p595) Materialists respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics "react against the disciplined, buffered self"(p609) that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence.
To resolve the modern cross pressures and dilemmas Taylor proposes a "maximal demand" that we define our moral aspirations in terms that do not "crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity".(p640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing."(p641)
Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award".(p706) The vertical hopes to rise higher, to reestablish trust, "to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing"(p708) and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory over evil in sacred violence, religious or secular.
Taylor examines the Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, how we follow the Romantic search for fullness, yet seem to respond still to our religious heritage. We replace the old "higher time" with autobiography, history, and commemoration. Many moderns are uncomfortable with death, "the giving up of everything"(p725)
"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief."(p727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured."(p727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Vaclav Havel
, Ivan Illich
, Charles Peguy
, and Gerard Manley Hopkins
. The path to the future is a rich variety of paths to God in a unity of the church and a new approach to the question of the sexual/sensual. The disciplined, disengaged secular world is challenged by a return to the body in Pentecostalism
. There is a "profound interpenetration of eros and the spiritual life."(p767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality."(p768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.
Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery."(p769) But in the secular "'waste land'... young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries."(p770) It will, Taylor thinks, involve a move away from "excarnation," the disembodying of spiritual life, and from homogenization in a single principle, to celebrate the "integrity of different ways of life:"(p772) celibacy and sex, war and peace.
and the Radical Orthodoxy
movement.
Intellectual History Review,
Political Theory
,
Implicit Religion,
the European Journal of Sociology,
and in many other professional journals.
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...
. The sociologist Robert Bellah has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."
In recent years, secularism
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...
has become an important topic in the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
and social sciences. Although there continue to be important disagreements among scholars, many begin with the premise that secularism is not simply the absence of religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as an historical construction.
In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a state in which it is almost impossible not to believe in God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. He argues against the view that secularity in society is caused by the rise of science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
and reason
Reason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
. He argues that this view is far too simplistic and does not explain why people would abandon their faith
Faith
Faith is confidence or trust in a person or thing, or a belief that is not based on proof. In religion, faith is a belief in a transcendent reality, a religious teacher, a set of teachings or a Supreme Being. Generally speaking, it is offered as a means by which the truth of the proposition,...
.
In his previous work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
Sources of the Self
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a philosophy book written by Charles Taylor and published in 1989 by Harvard University Press. It is an attempt to articulate and to write a history of the "modern identity".-Summary:...
, Taylor focuses on the developments which led to the identity of modern individuals in the West. This work focuses on the developments which led to modern social structures. The content of Sources of the Self is complementary to A Secular Age.
Three modes of secularity are distinguished: one, secularized public spaces, two, the decline of belief and practice and three, cultural conditions where unbelief in religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
is a viable option. This text focuses on secularity three.
Up until a few hundred years ago, the common viewpoint of the North Atlantic was basically Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
. Most people could not even consider a viewpoint without God. The culture has changed so that multiple viewpoints are now conceivable to most people.
Taylor starts with a description of the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and presents the changes to bring about the modern secular age. The Middle Ages were a time of enchantment
Enchantment
Enchantment may refer to:*Incantation or enchantment, a magical spell, charm or bewitchment, in traditional fairy tales or fantasy*the sense of Wonder or Delight**for the usage by J.R.R. Tolkien, see "On Fairy Stories"titles and proper names...
. People believed in God, angels, demons, witches, the Church's sacrament
Sacrament
A sacrament is a sacred rite recognized as of particular importance and significance. There are various views on the existence and meaning of such rites.-General definitions and terms:...
s, relic
Relic
In religion, a relic is a part of the body of a saint or a venerated person, or else another type of ancient religious object, carefully preserved for purposes of veneration or as a tangible memorial...
s, and sacred places. Each of these types of things had mysterious, real effects on individuals and society.
The early Middle Ages
Early Middle Ages
The Early Middle Ages was the period of European history lasting from the 5th century to approximately 1000. The Early Middle Ages followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire and preceded the High Middle Ages...
were content to have two speeds for people's spiritual development. The clergy
Clergy
Clergy is the generic term used to describe the formal religious leadership within a given religion. A clergyman, churchman or cleric is a member of the clergy, especially one who is a priest, preacher, pastor, or other religious professional....
and a few others were at the faster, more intense speed. Everyone else was only expected to plod along at a slower spiritual speed. The High Middle Ages
High Middle Ages
The High Middle Ages was the period of European history around the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries . The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which by convention end around 1500....
had a strong focus on bringing everyone along to a higher realm of spirituality and life.
Deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...
and the modern secular age. This change is accomplished through three major facets of Deism: one, an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
as primarily for people, two, the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established, and three, the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone.
Taylor discussed the political implications of A Secular Age in an interview with The Utopian.
Preface/Introduction
Taylor is "telling a story... of 'secularization' in the modern West[,]"(p.ix) and what the process amounts to. I.e., religion: "as that which is retreating in public space (1), or as a type of belief and practice which is or is not in regression (2), and as a certain kind of belief or commitment whose conditions in this age are being examined (3)."(p15)Taylor does not believe that the decline in belief occurred because "'Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
refuted the Bible", as allegedly said by a Harrow
Harrow School
Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...
schoolboy in the 1890s." So he wants to discuss belief and unbelief "not as rival theories... but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other[.]"(p5) Where is the place of richness or fullness, and its opposite, the place of absence or exile? There is also the "middle condition," the daily activities between the extremes, and their meaning.
For believers the place of fullness is God. For unbelievers it is within, the power of reason (Enlightenment
Enlightenment (spiritual)
Enlightenment in a secular context often means the "full comprehension of a situation", but in spiritual terms the word alludes to a spiritual revelation or deep insight into the meaning and purpose of all things, communication with or understanding of the mind of God, profound spiritual...
) or Nature, or our inner depths (Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
). Also, postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
wants to stand outside reason and sentiment, on the idea that fullness is a projection that cannot be found.
In the old world people could have a naive belief, but today belief or unbelief is "reflective," and includes a knowledge that other people do not/do believe. We look over our shoulder at other beliefs, but we still each live a "background," with our beliefs "held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted... tacit... because never formulated."(p13)
Part I: The Work of Reform
"[W]hy was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?"(p25) God's presence retreated in three dimensions. (1) People no longer see natural events as acts of God. (2) Society "could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than human action in secular time."(p25) (3) People lived then in an enchanted world, now in disenchantment.Rejecting the "subtraction" theory of secularization, Taylor believes that a movement of Reform in Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, aiming to raise everyone up to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice, caused the move to secularization. The disciplined Reformed self replaced the "porous" self, vulnerable to external forces, spirits and demons, with a new "buffered" self, a disciplined and free agent living in a progressively disenchanted world.
The success of Reform and the propagation of successful disciplined selves leads to a disciplinary society that starts to take action against rowdiness and indiscipline: controlling the poor, taming the warrior aristocracy, suppressing "feasts of misrule" like Carnival
Carnival
Carnaval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February. Carnaval typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, mask and public street party...
. Calvinists and Puritans were "industrious, disciplined... mutually predictable... With such men a safe, well-ordered society can be built."(p106) The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism.(p130) "So disengaged discipline frames a new experience of the self as having a telos of autarky."(p138)
Early humans were embedded into the world in three ways: into their small-scale social group in which religious ritual was identical with social ritual; into the cosmos, the enchanted world of spirits and forces; and the cosmos into the divine, so that the gods are intimately involved with the project of human flourishing. Thus: "Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine."(p152)
This embedding is broken, for an elite, by the "higher" religions of the Axial Age
Axial Age
German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the axial age or axial period to describe the period from 800 to 200 BC, during which, according to Jaspers, similar revolutionary thinking appeared in India, China and the Occident...
. Humans are individuals, no longer embedded in society, God is no longer embedded in the cosmos, but separate, and the notion of human flourishing becomes transformed, e.g., in "a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing."(p152) In the Reformation and after this disembedding extended more and more from the elite to the whole population.
More and more, in recent times: "Humans are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit."(p159) This modern social imaginary
Imaginary (sociology)
The imaginary, or social imaginary is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society....
is the Modern Moral Order, and it is a radical break with the two pre-modern moral orders, the idea of "the Law of a people"(p163) or the organization of society "around a notion of hierarchy in society which expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos."(p163)
Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding."(p176) "They are, respectively (1) the "economy", (2) the public sphere, and (3) the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule."(p176) Both the economy and the public sphere are conceived as existing independent of the political power. In the notion of economy is the "invisible hand" and the exchange of advantages in a relationship of interlocking causes. The state becomes "the orchestrating power that can make an economy flourish."(p178)
This new moral order is no longer a society of "mediated access" where the subjects are held together by an apex, a King, "We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one, from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct-access societies."(p209)
Taylor anticipates that his approach might be attacked as "idealism" against the Marxian requirement of "materialism." But ideas and material conditions are inseparable. "'Ideas' always come in history wrapped up in certain practices[.]"(p213)
Part II: The Turning Point
The program of Reform, by creating a disciplined, ordered society, in which the vulnerable "porous self" became the disengaged "buffered self", created a distance between humans and God. Thus exclusive humanism became an option through the "notion of the world designed by God... God relates to us primarily by establishing a certain order of things... We obey God by following the demands of this order."(p221) A true, original, natural religion, once obscured, is now to be laid clear again.Christianity always provided for ordinary human flourishing, but included inscrutable divine grace. With Deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
grace became eclipsed, for people endowed with reason and benevolence need only these faculties to carry out God's plan. God's Providence
Divine Providence
In Christian theology, divine providence, or simply providence, is God's activity in the world. " Providence" is also used as a title of God exercising His providence, and then the word are usually capitalized...
, once a mystery, is just God's plan. Eventually we come to Feuerbach: "that the potentialities we have attributed to God are really human potentialities."(p251)
Taylor makes a threefold claim. First, that "exclusive humanism arose in connection with, indeed, as an alternative set of moral sources for, the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit." Second, that "it couldn't have arisen in any other way at the time."(p259) Third, that today's wide range of unbelief still originates "in the ethic of beneficent order."
The usual interpretation of the changing understanding of God in recent centuries is a move from a "supreme being with powers... [of] agency and personality" to God as creator of a "law-governed structure" to "an indifferent universe, with God either indifferent or non-existent."(p270) This the subtraction story. Taylor thinks that it's more complicated than that.
The official Enlightenment story is that "people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition"(p273) to explain the world. The social order can be organized by rational codes, and human relationships which matter are prescribed in the codes. But the motive force behind this development was reformed Christianity and its move to a designer God in the early modern period.
In the new epistemic predicament, humans "acquire knowledge by exploring impersonal orders with the aid of disengaged reason."(p294) They form "societies under the normative provisions of the Modern Moral Order." In the secularist understanding, "human beings discover that they just are humans united in societies which can have no other normative principles but those of the MMO."(p294) "It is a massive shift in horizon."
Part III: The Nova Effect
Taylor sees three stages of a nova effect, an explosion of secularity beginning with "an exclusive alternative to Christian faith"(p299) in the 18th century. It was followed by diversification in the 19th century, even to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit. Finally in the last 50 years the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes "a generalised culture of 'authenticity', or expressive individualism," of doing your own thing.But there are cross pressures. Against the freedom from "unreasoning fears" there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration; utilitarianism is thought too flat and shallow. There is no room for death.
Unbelief in the middle to late 19th century began to take up the profound new sense of the universe, its vastness in space and time, and in the lack of a plan. Taylor calls this the modern "cosmic imaginary" (the natural version of the modern "social imaginary"). "Our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere."(p325) Through the idea of the sublime and recovery of the "well-springs of sympathy"(p344) in Herder
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...
and Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
lost to disengaged reason we reach eventually the Will of Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
. We experience a universe maybe without a "rational, benign plan", bottomless, and the "locus of our dark genesis."
This leads to the theories of Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, that the "highest functions, thinking, willing, are... the product of neuro-physiological functions in us."(p348) The new imaginary sustains a range of views, from "the hardest materialism through to Christian orthodoxy."(p351) This has confounded the war between belief and unbelief.
The opening up of different ways in experiencing the world includes a shift in the place of art. Instead of mimesis
Mimesis
Mimesis , from μιμεῖσθαι , "to imitate," from μῖμος , "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the...
, the retelling of the Christian world-view through its standard symbols and reference points, we have a creative art that must develop its own reference points. Artists "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words... In this 'subtler language'... something is defined and created as well as manifested."(p353) This applies to poetry, painting, and music taking an "absolute" turn, decoupled from story and representation. Yet they still move. But why? The mystery provides a place of the spiritual and the deep for the unbeliever.
Taylor invokes Schiller
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
and his notion of "beauty as an aid to being moral", a "stage of unity as a higher stage, beyond moralism" obtained through play, the way we "create and respond to beauty."(p358) It creates an unspecified space "between religious commitment and materialism."(p360)
In the 19th century two additional factors influenced people in renouncing their faith in God: advances and science and Biblical scholarship, and the new cosmic imaginary.
People came to feel that the "impersonal order of regularities" was a more mature standpoint than the faith in a personal God. The new cosmic imaginary of a universe vast in time and space also argued against "a personal God or benign purpose." A materialist view is adult; faith in a personal God is childish.
Another view is associated with Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, the "post-Schopenhauerian" vision that notices the "irrational, amoral, even violent forces within us."(p369) These "cannot simply be condemned and uprooted, because our existence, and/or vitality, creativity, strength, ability to create beauty depend on them." This rebels against the Enlightenment
Enlightenment (spiritual)
Enlightenment in a secular context often means the "full comprehension of a situation", but in spiritual terms the word alludes to a spiritual revelation or deep insight into the meaning and purpose of all things, communication with or understanding of the mind of God, profound spiritual...
in a way that echoes the old aristocratic and warrior ethos, a "revolt from within unbelief... against the primacy of life"(p372) i.e., that "our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering... Life properly understood also affirms death and destruction."(p373)
Thus it is possible for people to live in a world encountering "no echo outside." This view experiences "its world entirely as immanent."(p376)
After a resurgence of belief driven by the Evangelical movement, by the 1830s elites began to experience again the cross-pressure between "the inescapable idea of an impersonal order"(p378) and the need to avoid a flattened world shorn of the values of Christianity. Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
attempted his own faith in "the human potential for spiritual/moral ascent"(p380) in the face of "utilitarian-commercial-industrial society." In Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
this becomes a faith in culture, "the best that has been thought and said in the world."(p384) Darwin and evolution changed everything, but the "need to articulate something fuller, deeper"(p391) continues.
The high cultural trajectory was accompanied by the slow replacement of the vertical understanding of society into the modern horizontal idea of rights-bearing individuals related in mutual benefit, a combination of constitutional monarchy, rights and freedoms, Protestant religions, and British "decency", i.e., character and self-control. This strenuous ethic of belief set up "an unbelieving philosophy of self-control"(p395) in Leslie Stephen
Leslie Stephen
Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.-Life:...
and John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
, a "humanism of altruism and duty."(p398)
But this moralism provoked a rebellion by the young at the end of the century. It was too materialistic and too stifling. The new rebels were opposed not only to the "ethic of self control in its altruistic, public-spirited facet, but also in its individualistic, self-improving, "self-help" aspect."(p401) In one version, with G.M. Trevelyan, it teeters on the edge of the material/transcendent divide, in another, with Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, it replaces the transcendent with aetheticism.
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
was another approach, an ethic of "personal relations and beautiful states of mind."(p405) It carried immanence another step, identifying the intrinsically valuable with the internal experience and sensibility. Then along came the World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Here was a war fought for "civilization... the protection of life from violence through order and law."(p407) Yet the war was a "greater negation of civilized life than any foe threatened." Thus Pound's
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
notion of "a botched civilization" and Eliot's
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
"Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
." For intellectuals it was impossible to inhabit the mental world of Rupert Brooke
Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier...
. Educated people could not deploy images of dedication and patriotism without distance and irony. "The will was suspect"(p411) a "formula for destruction rather than virtue". We get to the post-war consensus
Post-war consensus
The post-war consensus is a name given by historians to an era in British political history which lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979....
of an interventionist state. There is an option to believe that is wisely refused, and a confident, buffered identity.
The trajectory took different forms in the Catholic cultures. In particular in France the modern order of mutual benefit, in its Rousseau version, becomes Republican and anti-Christian if not always clearly atheist. The notion of humans as innocent and good requires a political order opposed to the Christian original sin
Original sin
Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
. The social imaginary "is grounded in exclusive humanism"(p412) and becomes radicalized in Marxist socialism. Opposed to this imaginary was "Reaction," a vertical hierarchy "where differences of rank were respected"(p413) and each had his place under monarchy, albeit justified by its beneficial consequences rather than an ontic logos.
An ideal order "stressing rights, liberties and democracy, squares off against a counter-ideal which stresses obedience, hierarchy, belonging to, even sacrifice."(p414) But there can be crossovers, with Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
and a scientific "religion to provide social cohesion" and an unbelieving Nietzsche with heroes, suffering as an ineradicable dimension that "heroes learn to face and surmount".(p415) By 1912 Henri Massis
Henri Massis
Henri Massis was a French essayist, literary critic and literary historian.- Works :* Comment Émile Zola composait ses romans, 1905. * Le Puits de Pyrrhon, 1907.* La Pensée de Maurice Barrès, 1909...
and Alfred de Tarde write of a generation of youth needing a new discipline to create order and hierarchy and commitment against the dilettante generation of 1885. This movement was shattered in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Many went into the war celebrating the opportunity for "heroism and dedication" only to be "sent wholesale to death in a long, mechanized slaughter."(p417)
The crisis of civilization dealt a body blow to established Christianity, and provoked "new, unbelieving variants of the vertical ideal of order"(p418) in fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. Thus the struggle between belief and unbelief "has been connected with ideals and counter-ideals of the moral order of society. But this conflict has disappeared, as religion has delinked from society into "a new kind of niche in society."(p419)
Part IV: Narratives of Secularization
To combat the standard narrative of secularization, e.g., Steve Bruce's proposal that the endpoint of secularization is a widespread indifference to religion, and "no socially significant shared religion"(p435) Taylor proposes an age of mobilization, from about 1800 to 1960 where religious forms of the ancien régime type suffered decay, but new forms that fit the age "recruited and mobilized people on an impressive scale."(p471) Churches organized their members' lives and inspired intense loyalty, so that "people would be schooled, play football, take their recreation, etc., exclusively among co-religionists."(p472)In France this process played out as a direct combat between the ancien régime
Ancien Régime in France
The Ancien Régime refers primarily to the aristocratic, social and political system established in France from the 15th century to the 18th century under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties...
church and the secular Republicans in which the Church began organizing lay people in new bodies for fundraising, pilgrimages, and "Catholic Action
Catholic Action
Catholic Action was the name of many groups of lay Catholics who were attempting to encourage a Catholic influence on society.They were especially active in the nineteenth century in historically Catholic countries that fell under anti-clerical regimes such as Spain, Italy, Bavaria, France, and...
." In the Anglophone world this mobilization occurred through "denominations" (e.g. Methodists
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
) that "are like affinity groups"(p449), an organizing force to help people struggling to find their feet in the market economy.
But with the cultural revolution of the 1960s the age of mobilization came to an end, at least in the modern West. The last half century has seen a cultural revolution in the North Atlantic civilization. "As well as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms, we now have a widespread "expressive" individualism."(p473) Taylor calls this a culture of "authenticity," from the Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
expressivism that erupted in the late 18th century elite, "that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own."(p475)
This affects the social imaginary
Imaginary (sociology)
The imaginary, or social imaginary is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society....
. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people"(p481) is added a space of fashion, a culture of mutual display. The modern moral order of mutual benefit has been strengthened, mutual respect requires that "we shouldn't criticize each other's 'values'"(p484) in particular on sexual matters. Since "my" religious life or practice is my personal choice, my "link to the sacred" may not be embedded in "nation" or "church." This is a continuation of the Romantic move away from reason towards a "subtler language" (Shelley) to understand individual "spiritual insight/feeling." "Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self."(p489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order."(p492)
The revolution in sexual behavior has broken the culture of "moralism" that dominated most of the last half millennium. Developing individualism was bound to come into conflict with moralism, but in the mid 20th century the dam broke. Thinkers started to think of sexual gratification as good, or at least unstoppable, especially as "in cities, young people could pair off without supervision."(p501) Now people are not bound by moralism: "they form, break, then reform relationships;"(p496) they experiment.
It is a tragedy, however that "the codes which churches want to urge on people" still suffer from "the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues."(p503)
Today, the "neo-Durkheimian
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
embedding of religion in a state"(p505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism"(p506) has been called into question. People are asking, like Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" They are heirs of the expressive revolution, "seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self... of the body and its pleasures... The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality."(p507) This is often termed "spirituality" as opposed to "organized religion."
This has caused a breaking down of barriers between religious groups but also a decline in active practice and a loosening of commitment to orthodox dogmas. A move from an Age of Mobilization to an Age of Authenticity, it is a "retreat of Christendom." Fewer people will be "kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity,"(p514) although a core (vast in the US) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP."(p515)
Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag"(p515) spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, study group, pilgrimage, special prayer, etc. It will be "unhooked" from the paleo-Durkheimian sacralized society, the neo-Durkheimian national identity or center of "civilizational order" but still collective. "One develops a religious life."(p518)
While religious life continues many people retain a nominal tie with the church, particularly in Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
. This "penumbra" seems to have diminished since 1960. More people stand outside belief, and no longer participate in rites of passage like church baptism and marriage. Yet people respond to, e.g. in France the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis
Clovis I
Clovis Leuthwig was the first King of the Franks to unite all the Frankish tribes under one ruler, changing the leadership from a group of royal chieftains, to rule by kings, ensuring that the kingship was held by his heirs. He was also the first Catholic King to rule over Gaul . He was the son...
, or in Sweden the loss of a trans-Baltic ferry. Religion "remains powerful in memory; but also as a kind of reserve fund of spiritual force or consolation."(p522)
This distancing is not experienced in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. This may be (1) because immigrants used church membership as a way to establish themselves: "Go to the church of your choice, but go."(p524) Or (2) it may be the difficulty that the secular elite has in imposing its "social imaginary" on the rest of society vis-a-vis hierarchical Europe. Also (3) the US never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the US have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God." There are less skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power."(p528) Finally (5) the US has provided experimental models of post-Durkheimian religion at least for a century.
After summarizing his argument, Taylor looks to the future, which might follow the slow reemergence of religion in Russia in people raised in the "wasteland" of militant atheism, but suddenly grabbed by God, or it might follow the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon in the west. "In any case, we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee."
Part V: Conditions of Belief
We live in an immanent frame. That is the consequence of the story Taylor has told, in disenchantment and the creation of the buffered self and the inner self, the invention of privacy and intimacy, the disciplined self, individualism. Then Reform, the breakup of the cosmic order and higher time in secular, making the best of clock time as a limited resource. The immanent frame can be open, allowing for the possibility of the transcendent, or closed. Taylor argues that both arguments are "spin" and "involve a step beyond available reasons into the realm of anticipatory confidence"(p551) or faith.There are several Closed World Structures that assume the immanent frame. One is the idea of the rational agent of modern epistemology. Another is the idea that religion is childish, so "An unbeliever has the courage to take up an adult stance and face reality."(p562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their world views, they "function as unchallenged axioms"(p590) and it just becomes very hard to understand why anyone would believe in God.
Living in the immanent frame "The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other".(p595) Materialists respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics "react against the disciplined, buffered self"(p609) that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence.
To resolve the modern cross pressures and dilemmas Taylor proposes a "maximal demand" that we define our moral aspirations in terms that do not "crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity".(p640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing."(p641)
Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award".(p706) The vertical hopes to rise higher, to reestablish trust, "to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing"(p708) and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory over evil in sacred violence, religious or secular.
Taylor examines the Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, how we follow the Romantic search for fullness, yet seem to respond still to our religious heritage. We replace the old "higher time" with autobiography, history, and commemoration. Many moderns are uncomfortable with death, "the giving up of everything"(p725)
"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief."(p727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured."(p727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Vaclav Havel
Václav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
, Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...
, Charles Peguy
Charles Péguy
Charles Péguy was a noted French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism, but by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a devout but non-practicing Roman Catholic.From that time, Catholicism strongly influenced his...
, and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
. The path to the future is a rich variety of paths to God in a unity of the church and a new approach to the question of the sexual/sensual. The disciplined, disengaged secular world is challenged by a return to the body in Pentecostalism
Pentecostalism
Pentecostalism is a diverse and complex movement within Christianity that places special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, has an eschatological focus, and is an experiential religion. The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, the Greek...
. There is a "profound interpenetration of eros and the spiritual life."(p767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality."(p768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.
Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery."(p769) But in the secular "'waste land'... young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries."(p770) It will, Taylor thinks, involve a move away from "excarnation," the disembodying of spiritual life, and from homogenization in a single principle, to celebrate the "integrity of different ways of life:"(p772) celibacy and sex, war and peace.
Epilogue: The Many Stories
In a brief afterword Taylor links his narrative to similar efforts by e.g., John MilbankJohn Milbank
Alasdair John Milbank is a Christian theologian and the Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham where he also directs the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. Milbank previously taught at the University of Virginia and before that at the University of Cambridge...
and the Radical Orthodoxy
Radical orthodoxy
Radical Orthodoxy is Christian theological and philosophical school of thought which makes use of postmodern philosophy to reject the paradigm of modernity...
movement.
Reviews
A Secular Age has been reviewed inIntellectual History Review,
Political Theory
Political Theory (journal)
Political Theory is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of Political Science. The journal's editor is Mary G. Dietz...
,
Implicit Religion,
the European Journal of Sociology,
and in many other professional journals.