SA – Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007). All references are to this work unless
otherwise stated.
HS – James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular:
Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).
(NOTE WELL! These
notes and reflections are meant to be a “first step” into Charles Taylor’s A
Secular Age. As with all introductions, they are very preliminary,
incomplete, and even simplistic. This piece is meant to lead into a more
in-depth study of Taylor’s important work.)
How did We Get Here?
Charles Taylor
posits a question at the beginning of the book which guides the whole work: How
is it that in the 1500s in the West it was virtually impossible for anyone to
doubt the existence of God, whereas now in the 2000s, in the same Western civilization,
it has become so difficult for many people to believe in God and in a
transcendent being and dimension (p. 25)? Note that this is a question about—to
use Taylor’s words—the “conditions of belief” (chapter 1). In the past, belief
was considered axiomatic, a given, i.e., it had high plausibility for most people
in the West; now instead the tables have turned. Belief in God and in a transcendent
realm is widely considered to be quite implausible, i.e., it has low
plausibility among a substantial number of Westerners.
The book A
Secular City is intended as an answer to that question. Taylor tries to do
it in the form of a “story” (p. 29) that purports to relate what occurred in
Western history which transformed Western civilization into the secularized
milieu that we know it to be now. Of course, he also describes extensively what
he thinks as the situation in the West in the present with regard to how people
find meaning in a secular world and what that implies for religion in general.
I would say that this
short piece of mine will focus on the present situation and what relevance that
has and will have for religion in the West although it is very important to
know the history of how the West became secularized, a topic that Taylor’s book
has a lot to say about.
What is a “Secular Age”? “Cross Pressures”
Firstly, what exactly
then is a “secular age” for Taylor? We can say that Taylor perceives this to be
an age in which the following situation is firmly in place: Today, faith in God
or maintaining a transcendent worldview (i.e., a worldview in which the
transcendent is perceived to be real) is largely and constantly contested and
challenged in Western societies. In other words, all faith today (even in pockets
in the West where people still do have religious faith!) is nevertheless fraught
with doubt. We can say then that the “contestability of belief” (HS, p. 10)
seems to be the widespread and general default position and situation in the
West today. If people are believers in the West today, they are, one can say,
generally in a socially weaker position because they are constantly nagged by
the open and blatant questioning that contemporary Western society as a whole
hurls at them, challenging them to justify why belief in God and in transcendence
is still reasonable and justifiable. This is also partly the reason for the
rise of vigorous apologetics in more conservative and fundamentalistic believers’
circles.
Of course, the
opposite also holds true. That is, non-believers are at times caught up in the
nostalgic and intriguing possibility that there might indeed be a God or a
transcendent dimension. Taylor refers to this situation as being “cross-pressured”
(this is one meaning of the term among others, cf. chap. 16). At any rate, I
would agree with Taylor that it is unbelief in or doubt about a transcendent
realm that is dominant in the West today.
So, what exactly has
happened in the West that transformed it from a thoroughly religious to an
almost thoroughly secularized civilization in the space of 500 years or so?
The Subtraction Theory
The common and
popular explanation as what could account for the secularization of the West can
be expressed as the “subtraction theory” (pp. 26 ff). According to this theory,
pre-modern people were “unenlightened” because they didn’t have the scientific
knowledge that became dominant in the West only since the Enlightenment. Hence,
their worldview was encrusted with pre-modern, primitive, mythical, even superstitious
beliefs in supernatural beings, fairies, enchantments, magic, spirits, and so
on and so on. Belief in the divine and the spiritual dimension, according to
the subtraction theory, is part of this!
Since the Western
Enlightenment though, humans have made giant strides in—what this theory views
as—the “real” nature of things based on science (also reason, mathematics, and technology)
(see e.g. p. 273). These modern advancements have sort of taken off, scraped
off the “enchanted” encrustations in order to reveal the true (which mostly
means: scientific and rational) nature of things. In short, all the enchanted
(mythical) ideas that governed pre-modern humans were “subtracted” from the
equation (this process can also be called “disenchantment”) and what came out
of it was voila! our secular and “enlightened” world (p. 572). This is
the commonly heard subtraction theory-based way of explaining the emergence of
a secular age.
To be noted well though
is that Taylor does not agree with the subtraction theory; he considers
it too simplistic an explanation of the phenomenon of secularity that does not
do justice to the complexity of how the secular age actually emerged.
The Secular Age is an Accomplishment (cf.
also HS, chap. 1)
– Exclusive Humanism
Taylor explains
the emergence of the secular age rather as a veritable and impressive post-Enlightenment
human accomplishment. From a worldview that was centred on the existence of God
and a whole transcendental realm, Westerners, from the Enlightenment onwards,
were able to gradually construct a worldview in which the centre of
gravity shifted from God/Transcendent to Human/Immanent
(p. 143). In gradual stages and with the advancement of the empirical
disciplines as well as philosophies based on human reason and consciousness (i.e.,
Descartes, Kant, etc.), humans no longer felt the need to invoke the
Transcendent (whether that be God or the spiritual realm) in order to find
meaning. They began to find meaning in the here and now, in the immanent realm.
And not only a poor, measly kind of “life-meaning”. Post-enlightenment
Westerners have actually constructed a meaning of life based (almost)
exclusively on immanent realities, on the here and now, on humanistic values divorced
from any divine, transcendent, and spiritual dimension and they (many/most?
people) are perfectly happy with that and feel no need to have recourse to a “higher”
realm!
The secular age
then is the rise of a civilization in which people began to have—what Taylor describes
as—“exclusive humanism” (pp. 19-28; 636-642) as the default “social imaginary”
(another Taylor-coined word which means “the way that we collectively imagine,
even pre-theoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world'' SA
p. 146).
Taylor’s description
and analysis of key moments and movements that effected this change in Western
society is, we can say, the heart of his 800+ page tome and it deserves a
careful reading and study.
To be noted
particularly are: Part I, chapter 2; Part II, chapters 6 & 7; Part III, chapters
8, 10, 11; Part IV, chapter 12. (Hopefully, I might have another blog piece
that does more justice to the content of those parts!)
“Porous” and “Buffered” Worldviews
The pre-Enlightenment
Western worldview could be described as “porous” (pp. 35-43) because, in this
view, humans and the world were, as it were, full of openings (hence “porous”)
through which divine and transcendent realities were thought of as being able
to penetrate and influence humans in direct and significant ways. Since the Reformation
and Enlightenment though, Westerners—it can be said—gradually began to acquire
and adopt a “buffered” (pp. 37-42) view of humanity and the world – buffered
because we and our world were seen to be self-contained, not open, effectively
closed to or, in short, “buffered” from the Divine and other transcendent
realities. This immanent frame of reference—focused on exclusive humanism and this
empirical world—has unquestionably become the dominant worldview in the West
and Westerners have increasingly felt that they do not need to invoke “God” or
other transcendent realities anymore to ground the meaning of life and
existence. Taylor maintains that this is now our dominant “social imaginary” in
the West and because of this we can indeed call our milieu a veritable secular
age.
The Nova Effect and the Age of Authenticity
Now that we are squarely
located and living in a secular age, we can readily observe—what Taylor calls—a
“Nova Effect” (p. 399) in our Western context. He refers to a veritable
explosion of options for creating or finding significance (aka, “authenticity”).
This began after the one dominant and controlling story or scheme of significance
in the West (i.e., Christianity) broke down and exploded into a plethora of possibilities
for sustaining meaning at the personal and communal levels since the Renaissance
(that’s what “nova effect” wants to convey).
Presently in the
West, society-at-large by and large no longer gives institutional and social
support to religion and the pursuit of spirituality, hence, each individual
must fend for him/herself in order to become truly him/herself or “authentic”. This
is of course reflective of our Western society’s individualism. The search for
authenticity in our age takes place in a context where we are offered mainly humanistic
and immanent paths. At the same time, as we search for authenticity, we are confronted
with such a mind-bogglingly massive number of possible paths (the nova effect),
that could lead to us being authentically true to ourselves or even “spiritual”(in
a sense), that it actually becomes very difficult
to choose a/one path. Despite this, it remains a crucial task to seek our own path
of meaning in this “age of authenticity” (pp. 473-504).
***
These, I think, are
some of the most important points that Charles Taylor makes in his landmark
work A Secular City.
Now, it is time to do a more in-depth study of this
significant work!
