Thursday, December 19, 2019

Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age': My (JKK's) Initial Take on Its Most Important Points



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.)

 I've been working on trying to grasp better Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's very important 2007 book A Secular Age because this work informs my current project (a book that I'm now writing) in a significant way. Here's my preliminary take on what I think are the most important points Taylor makes in the book ...


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!