Introduction:
Offering help on a worldview and an answer to existential questions:
Confident 'new atheists' for example, delineate where we are with a new bravado. Employing a kind of intellectual; colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening the world by disenchantment.
Smith describes our present moment as:
this pluralised, pressurised moment in which we find ourselves, where believers are best by doubt and doubters, every once in a while, find themselves tempted by belief.
Julian Barnes. A philosopher who wrote 'Nothing to be frightened of' never went to church, nor was he baptised but he begins his book with the words: 'I don't believe in God, but miss him.'
The doubters doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.
Steve Jobs admits his doubt in atheism:
quoting from Walter Isaacson's biography of him
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn't feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. 'I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God,' he said. 'For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meet the eye.'
He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. 'I like to think that something survives after you die,' he said. 'It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.' He fell silent for a very long time. 'But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch,' he said. 'Click! And you're gone.'
Then he paused again and smiled slightly. 'Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.
David Foster Wallace:
What passes for atheism is still a mode of worship, a kind of anti-religious religion, which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof, human autonomy, and self-determination... the fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
Most of us live in worlds like those portrayed in the above examples of doubt and faith more than in those mapped by either the new atheists or by religious fundamentalists.
Secular.
'Secular' has been used to mean three different but related things:
1)
secular was used in the middle ages to refer to anything that wasn't 'sacred'. Earthly and 'everyday' things were described as being
secular.
2)
secular is used to mean 'nonreligious'
3)
secular is used to mean 'there are options' of belief and belief is indeed one of them.
Ours is an age:
For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.
We are narrative animals however and so in order to properly critique and develop our view of the secular age we need to retell our story but without the reductionistic atheism it so often gets. Figure.
Chapter 1: Reforming Belief - the secular as modern accomplishment
Secular is not neutral. It is not just the throwing off of superstition. It is not just 'un'belief. It is a deliberate attempt to construct meaning and significance without any reference to the divine or transcendent.
Three features of medieval imaginary that functioned as obstacles to unbelief:
1) The natural world was seen as something that functioned semiotically, as a sign that pointed beyond itself, to what was more than nature.
2) Society itself was understood as something grounded in a higher reality; earthly kingdoms were grounded in heavenly kingdoms.
3) People believed they lived in a world that was 'charged' with enchantment, with presences, that was open and vulnerable, not closed and self-sufficient.
It isn't that everyone believed in God, it's just that atheism was 'unthinkable' in a world that was so constructed.
Atheism as we know it only became/becomes possible when those three features are removed.
Shifting the way we perceive the world to be affects us in that it not only makes exclusive humanism a live option for us, but it also changes the way believers believe. It changes religious communities. We are all secular now.
How did the 3 statements listed above change and so allow for the modern secular mind to develop?
Firstly. In the premodern enchanted world there was power 'out there' in the spaces we inhabit, the things of the world had power. In our world this isn't so. In our world the power is in our mind and our thought life:
The prospect of rejecting God does not involve retiring to the safe redoubt of the buffered self, but rather chancing ourselves in the field of forces without him... In general, going against God is not an option in the enchanted world.
Exclusive humanism becomes more thinkable when you not only rid the world of spirits and demons but also when you 'buffer' the self to make your own life more autonomy.
Secondly. Because of the 'porous' self and society (with outside power being the main seat of power in the cosmos) the social fabric was a lot more joined up. What one person did affected the whole of society and society's way of living and thinking; 'we're all in this together' was the way life actually operated:
As a result, a premium is placed on consensus, and 'turning heretic' is 'not just a personal matter.' That is there is no room for these matters to be ones of private preference.
This seems to me to be really key to gaining a greater understanding on the society and age as a whole:
When we look back condescendingly on the intolerance of earlier ages. As long as the common weal is bound up in collective rites, devotions, allegiances, it couldn't be seen just as an individual's own business that he break ranks, even less that he blaspheme or try to desecrate the rite. There was immense common motivation to bring him back into line. Individuals disbelief is not a private option we can grant to heretics to pursue on weekends; to the contrary, disbelief has communal repercussions.
The 'buffering' of the self or, as he puts it, the atomism of individuals allows for a very different social construct that isn't anywhere near as communitarian in its outlook:
If 'We' are not a seamless cloth, a tight-knit social body; instead 'we' are just a collection of individuals - like individual molecules in a social 'gas'. This diminishes the ripple effect of individual decisions and beliefs. You're free to be a heretic - which means, eventually, that you're free to be an atheist.
Because of the premodern understanding of power and the connection between heavenly expectations and earthly realities and because of the interconnectedness of people and society it led to the creation of a sort of 'division of labour' that made complete sense to them but which we find quite strange. The monks are praying
for the world (or on behalf of the world) in the world's stead since the mundane realities of life required a lot of energy and effort if they were to survive and yet the ordinary peasant or farmer didn't want to negate the expectations of the community upon them by cosmic heavenly powers.
There is a tension to be lived in here. A tension between the spiritual disciplines and expectations of a saint and the immediate concerns of the nursemaid.
Rhythms and seasons to the annual cycle of the society made it possible for people to enter into and attend to the pressures and expectations of eternity.
To help with this tension the societies at the time had 'safety-valve' moments that allowed a sort of ritualised release of some of the pressure. A day or two a year when people were allowed to engage in more animal/debased activity.
The modern mind resolves this tension by encouraging either a full embrace of the expectations of eternity in the form of puritanical living perhaps or a full rejection of the need for a lifestyle mindful of eternity that derives its entire meaning from within this world.
Reform. Reform is what led to the now perfectly plausible atheism. Not only the protestant reformation but all of the various movements of reform created by the mood of the day. That mood was in large part created by the pressure of eternal and creaturely life.
Reform unleashes:
If people aren't meeting the bar, you can either focus on helping people reach higher or you can lower the bar. This is why Reform unleashes both Puritanism and the 1960s.
Taylor argues that it is the protestant levelling of the two tiers (eternal and earthly) and calling all to the heavenly by 'railing against vice and cranking up the terrifying visions of damnation' that led to the desertion of a goodly part of their flock to humanism.
Religious reform called for secular reform which in turn makes possible exclusively humanist reform. The Reformation has some explaining to do.
The Journey: a Zig Zag
The journey from there (1500) to here (1968) isn't straight. It wasn't that 'a' led to 'b' led 'c' led to 'd'.
First there was a new interest in nature. This wasn't a non-Christian logical next step away from disenchantment but a Christian one initially. The protestant reformation destroyed the sacred secular divide by a focus on the incarnation. God inhabited the earthly. Since Christ entered the world, the lay world, the previously unhallowed world it inspires a new focus on this world:
This was primarily a revolution in devotion not metaphysics.
A parallel emphasis also arose alongside the new interest in incarnation was nominalism. The incarnational interest is not a step on the way to 'autonomisation' (autonomous secular humanism), but rather it is only when it is mixed with nominalism that it reacts to produce a 'zag' to the initial 'zig'.
Running parallel to this journey toward autonomy seen in the new interest in nature is in the realm of ethics and politics, expressed in the goal of 'civility'.
Civility: a sort of naturalised, secularised sanctification.
This then led to what Taylor calls a 'Christianised neo-Stoicism' which is a monster.
Neo-stoicism is the zig to which Deism will be the zag.
I like this bit:
These developments - desacramentalisation and the generalisation of 'discipline' - (that is I think the disenchantment/loss of magic and sacred and the turning of sanctification into civility) come with the 'eclipse' of other key features of premodern Christian religion. In particular, Taylor highlights the loss of any coherent place of worship (presumably since the sacred spaces of the church had been taken away and replaced by reason).
There are no straight shots however, just a series of turns that could have gone either way if it wasn't for certain historical contingencies.
Chapter 2: The Religious Path to Exclusive Humanism
Our secular age is not an age of disbelief but of believing otherwise. We cannot tolerate living in a world without meaning.
How did we get to exclusive humanism?
We had to learn how to be exclusively humanist; it is a second nature, not a first.
There were four 'eclipses' that paved the way, trapping any real meaning and purpose within the confines of 'this world' only. The goal became mere 'economy' or 'harmony' that is a concern with how to best organise life to be peaceful and productive. The heavens began to close to us.
We are so taken with the play on this field, we don't lament the loss of the stars overhead.
How apologetics diminishes Christianity.
Since the heavens were 'flattened' and all meaning was now believed to be within the reach of reason theologians began playing by these same rules when defending the faith. But in doing so, they created a form of theism that involved God at the beginning and the end but nowhere in the middle. This form of Christianity can be rejected without much consequence to a persons life.
There is no mystery any more since mystery cannot be tolerated. That lead to the way theologians and others thought about the 'problem' of evil. Now thinkers turned to the world around them to find the answer to every question regarding the inconsistencies in the world.
The scaled-down God and preshrunk religion defended by the apologists turned out to be insignificant enough to reject without consequence... Once God has been reduced to a 'deistic agent' the gig is pretty much up.
The Next step: The politics of 'polite' society.
For the new religious attitudes to gain traction in society it needed to be picked up by politics. And since the new goal was concerned more with economy (organisation and purpose) than mystery there was a 'benefit for society' sort of civil morality that was developed. The emphasis became on what
we can achieve and how
we ought to behave to be civilised. There was a confidence in humanities dignity that lead to the creation of meaning. What Taylor points out is that this sort of leap into exclusive humanism would not have been possible without the Christian conception.
Religion for Moderns.
The church became the unwitting reflector and creator of a new way of seeing God that was less and less like the Christian God. In essence they 'de-personed' God. God became the logic and reason behind the world and not so much a person in, over and under the world. To consider God as a person to be personally known was considered 'enthusiastic' and threatened to interrupt the ordered cosmos we have come to know and (if not love) understand.
According to historic, orthodox Christian faith, 'salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being, or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effect by, one might say, our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with the church.
There began a process not of incarnation but of
excarnation.
It turns out it's not so hard to see ourselves four hundred years ago; it's as if we're looking at childhood photos of our contemporary culture.
Chapter 3:
The Malaise of Immanence: The 'Feel' of a Secular Age
We live in an age where the plausibility structures of belief have changed, the conditions of belief have shifted. Theistic belief has not only been displaced from being the default it is now positively contested, we're not in Christendom any more.
The popular strident atheists don't give us a fair representation of things. They like to make out that anyone who's anyone (smart people) have given up belief in 'magical' beings and gods. Taylor however presents a more accurate view of the landscape. He says that 'our secular age is haunted, and has always been.' However, there's no going back now and 'seeking enchantment' will always only ever be 'seeking reenchantment after disenchantment.'
But almost as soon as unbelief becomes an option, unbelievers begin to have doubts - which is to say, they begin to wonder if there isn't something 'more'.
The Nova-effect
The buffering of the self against a supernatural world created, Taylor argues, a sort of 'nova like explosion' that lead to 'pluralisation' and 'fragilisation': pluralised because of the sheer array of options left open to us and fragilised because of the proximity and frequency.
Then there's wonderful quote outlining the way pluralism of faiths doesn't really hurt and only makes an impact when you become close to or familiar with a person of that 'other' faith:
This kind of multiplicity of faiths has little effect as long as it is neutralised by the sense that being like them is not really an option for me. As long as the alternative is strange and other, perhaps despised, but perhaps just too different, too weird, too incomprehensible, so that becoming that isn't really conceivable for me, so long will their difference not undermine my embedding in my own faith. This changes when through increased contact, interchange, even perhaps inter-marriage, the other becomes more and more like me, in everything else but faith: same activities, professions, opinions, tastes, etc. Then the issue posed by the difference becomes more insistent: why my way, and not hers? There is no other difference left to make the shift preposterous or unimaginable.
We find ourselves living caught by opposing pressures. On the one hand we live in a disenchanted world but on the other we find a sense of enchantment pressing in on us. On one hand we live with a sense of immanence, that the divine is all around us, and on the other hand a sense of transcendence, that the divine is 'out there' and beyond us.
This creates a sort of sickness within us. The reason for this sickness is that the same 'buffering' (or protecting) of the self against the supernatural also 'encloses' us and isolates us:
This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won't 'get to' it, but that nothing significant will stand out for us." Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui (feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction).
The section then ends with this beautiful and tragic phrase/idea:
Our insulation breeds a sense of cosmic isolation. We might have underestimated the ability of disenchantment to sustain significance. But now there's no going back.
The pressure this generates (living longingly for enchantment) creates a 'vague sense of loss: our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there."
This 'felt flatness' can manifest itself in different ways at different times. For example, it can be felt with particular force in rites of passage in life: birth, marriage, death. We continue to feel a pressure and need to mark it somehow. "The way we have always done this is by linking these moments up with the transcendent, the highest, the holy, the sacred... But the enclosure in the immanent leaves a hole here. Many people, who have no other connection or felt affinity with religion, go on using the ritual of the church for these rites de passage."
He then quotes a lengthy excerpt from the ruthlessly rational David Reiff about how he responded to and still responds to the death of his mother. It is a passage presenting a man aching for meaning but not allowing himself to believe in any and yet still enacting rituals that satisfy his need for meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.
The flatness is felt in the mundane as well as the momentous. In the mundane parts of life is where it can hurt the most:
Some people feel a terrible flatness in the everyday, and this experience has been identified particularly with commercial, industrial, or consumer society. They feel emptiness of the repeated, accelerating cycle of desire and fulfilment, in consumer culture; the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb. Material abundance can engender this existential sense of lack precisely because the swelling of immanence seems unable to make up for a pressure we still feel - from transcendence, from enchantment.
He then finishes this section with following statement:
But often - and perhaps more often than not now? - the 'cure' to this nagging pressure of absence is sought within immanence... looking for love/meaning/significance/quasi 'transcendence' within the immanent order.
An imaginary-shift: The modern cosmic imaginary
The nineteenth century, a century famous for an explosion of unbelief.
There was a shift from cosmos to universe in our science as well as in our social feeling. Our cosmic environment was an ordered, layered, hierarchical, shepherded
place to an infinite, cavernous, anonymous
space.
As humans we now find ourselves in the 'dark abyss of time' and we're 'no longer charter members of the cosmos, but occupy merely a narrow band of recent time.'
With this shift emerges the war between religion and science, a war that in reality, most people aren't caught up in. Taylor argues that
some people may even want to claim that we cannot make sense of them within a totally materialistic outlook. He then explains that most of us live in a sort of no-man's land in between the fighting.
Expanding unbelief: borrowing from transcendence
This is a fascinating idea. Taylor suggests that much of the shift from there to here can be seen in the artistic movements that unhinged art away from function and into our galleries.
The art in the new world shifted from imitating nature to having to make its world. At one time every image or poem drew upon a shared and understood way of seeing the world. Now we need a key to interpret its symbols and every poem has to contain within it an articulation of his own world references; in other words the poet has to create his own world.
This is really fascinating:
In earlier societies, the aesthetic was embroiled with the religious and the political - what we look on as ancient 'art objects' were, in fact and function, liturgical instruments, etc.
We call it art, whereas they used it functionally. He then goes on to explain the role art plays in our new world.
The arts offer us a way of understanding the feeling that there is something inadequate in our way of life, that we live by an order that represses what is really important. Art for art's sake is only possible within the disenchanted world we live and yet:
We turn to the world around us to offer us significance and meaning: the concert hall as temple; the museum as chapel; tourism as the new pilgrimage.
Where does this longing come from? Why do we feel it?
On the one hand, one might simply claim that we're still haunted because we're still too close to the time when we used to believe in ghosts; on the other hand, we might be haunted because,w ell, there's a Ghost there.
Who gets to adjudicate between the positions? Who gets to decide who's right? Taylor offers this: 'try this account on for size. Does it make sense of something you've
felt?'
Why we don't believe (or, Don't Believe Our Own Testimony)
This is a fascinating end to the chapter that points out that a person's converting from belief to unbelief is less about science, or whatever else they may say it's about, and is instead more about the 'story' that this way of viewing the world offers them.
If someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don't believe them. Because what's usually captured the person is not scientific evidence per se, but the
form of science.
Scientific materialism is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality... converts to unbelief always tell subtraction stories.
But their conversion to unbelief was also a conversion to a new faith: 'faith in science's ability.'
This is brilliant quote to end the summary of the chapter on:
If Taylor is right, it seems to suggest that the Christian response to such converts to unbelief is not to have an argument about the date or 'evidences' but rather to offer an alternative story that offers a more robust, complex understanding of the Christian faith. The goal of such witness would not be the minimal establishment of some vague theism but the invitation to historic, sacramental Christianity.
Chapter 4: Contesting the secularisation thesis
In our overview of 'there to here' we are up to the present age of unbelief. The achievement of our race to experience the world entirely as immanent (not at all trans-cendent, or 'up there' and mystical). A remarkable victory for darkness this may, but it is still an incredible achievement.
What are the background assumptions of those who propose a secualrisation thesis? For 'background assumption' Taylor uses the term 'unthought' (which is better than the 'subconscious' most people tend to use).
Taylor suggest that the 'unthought' of secularisationists?
It is an outlook which holds tat religion must decline either (a) because it is false, and science shows this to be son; or (b) because it is increasingly irrelevant now that we can cure ringworm by drenches; or (c) because religion is based on authority, and modern societies give an increasingly important place to individual autonomy; or some combination of the above. Some constellation of these assumptions is shared by academics even in countries like the US where wider religious participation is very high.
A 'religious' way of life is concerned with transformation. A valuable life isn't only concerned with a worldly economic 'human flourishing'. Taylor cites the example of Francis of Assisi who gave up his potentially very lucrative and economically productive life as a merchant to become a monk. A more recent example might be the 'Cambridge Seven' who used their talents for mission and the gospel rather than money. 'Tell me what you think of Francis' says Taylor 'and I'll tell you what your 'unthought is.'
This is where secularisation can be seen most clearly since secularism isn't concerned with transformation:
In a secular age it's not just that belief in supernatural entities becomes implausible; it's that pursuing a way of life that values something beyond human flourishing becomes unimaginable.
The Age of Authenticity : The social imaginary of expressive individualism
Taylor offers a potted history of thought from there to here in three progressive steps:
- AR: Ancien Regime when religion and state politics were so closely intermeshed. When elites are able to corrupt or alter religion (as in the Reformation).
- AM: Age of Mobilisation when we realised that we had to be the ones to create a new way of implementing the faith, new laws, new ways of governing, new rituals. (1800-1960)
- AA: Age of Authenticity is the age we find ourselves in and has only been around for the past 50 years or so. It is an age where the primary/only value in the world is choice and the last remaining virtue is tolerance.
The AA is what Taylor calls the 'social imaginary of expressive individualism'. It's what you get in a society like ours where the individual is most important. We must each, in this age, find our own way rather than live in conformity to others. In this world the thing of most value is choice: 'bare choice is a prime value, irrespective of what the choice is between.' and tolerance is the last remaining virtue 'the sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.'
This age has changed the feel of everyday life. He hones in on fashion as a case study for our age. Fashion is an expression of our individuality (or authenticity) it is also relational. Our fashion conveys signs and meanings that creates a sort of language by which we communicate with others. It is a way of 'being with' or identifying with others and so maintaining our relational/corporate nature while all the while professing a definition of self that is individualistic.
Here's a good quote:
My loud remarks and gestures are overtly addressed only to my immediate companions, my family group is sedately walking, engaged in our own Sunday outing, but all the time we are aware of this common space that we are building, in which the messages that cross take their meaning. In other words, we all behave now like thirteen-year-old girls.
Consumer identity trumps other identities such as citizenship or religious affiliation precisely because it
feels as though we have chosen it for ourselves as a statement of individuality and yet it's an identity chosen for us by the heads of large consumer corporations.
Consider the illusion of nonconformity in the case of the suburban skater kid whose mum buys him the $150 board blazoned with 'anarchy' symbols.
Tolerance. Tolerance as an ideal has long been present in the modern social imaginary, but what has happened in the past 50 years is erosion of the scaffolding that surrounded it. The importance of formation for example has been removed and whereas once it protected and steered tolerance, now tolerance without definition is adrift by itself.
The place of the sacred
Under the AR: my connection to the sacred entailed my belonging to the church, which also involved my belonging to the state.
In the AM: this sees the rise of denominations that individuals can choose to belong to, and in doing so are still connecting with something bigger - it's history and heritage becomes yours.
Now in the AA: We take the choice of belonging several stages further. 'The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this.' We are 'expressivists' in that it must be something that we feel individually expresses us. 'The expressivist forges her own religion, her own personal Jesus. It has become untethered from political allegiance which means that it becomes less rational to accept any external constraints, it doesn't 'make sense' to me to do anything that doesn't align directly with my expression of myself. Thus; whereas Methodists and Pietists unleashed an emphasis on emotional encounters with God but kept this tethered to orthodoxy, it is only a matter of time 'before the emphasis will shift more and more towards the strengths and the genuineness of the feelings rather than the nature of their object.'
A new spiritual injunction (warning) arises:
Let everyone follow his/her own path of spiritual inspiration. Don't be led off yours by the allegation that it doesn't fit with some orthodoxy.'
There's just too much that needs to be recorded and chewed on. Like this:
What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture - the 'stronger form of magic' found in the ever-new glow of consumer products.
The Quest: Spirituality in the age of authenticity
We need to differentiate between the framework of spirituality in the AA and the content of such spirituality. The reason for this is that it's too easy to dismiss spirituality in this age as consumerist and subjective. Taylor says (urging us to not write off a persons apparent spirituality by its appearance):
The new framework has a strongly individualist component, but this will not necessarily mean that the content will be individuating.
The ironic reality is that often our spiritual quest (for 'quest' is the AA's most celebrated form of spirituality) leads us back to (or into) a religion or form of spirituality that connects us in a much broader and historical sense with others. This is what it means to live in a secular age (that we often find ourselves in or pining for the previous age). Our inherited state of disenchantment doesn't satisfy us and so we long for or need reenchantment.
The chapter concludes by stating that we have a lot to be grateful for an ought not to pine after the AR. There was a lot of bad about it that we don't have to put up with now. 'The upshot' he says
'is that in a secular age committed secularity remains the creed of a relatively small minority. Because our past is irrevocably Christian, our secular age continues to be 'haunted' by this past, for example, at moments of rites or passage or in times of disaster etc.'
Chapter 5:
How (Not) to live in a secular age
We all (by virtue of being born into our time) live within an 'immanent frame' understanding of the world. That is we live within an understanding of the world that meaning and purpose is immanent (close by, within this world) and is not transcendent (immanence's opposite).
We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence.
So the question isn't
whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but
how.
Some inhabit it as a closed frame with a brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open fram with skylights open to transcendence.
How one inhabits the immanent frame hinges on just how one construes transcendence: Do you see the transcendent as 'a threat, a dangerous temptation, a distraction, or an obstacle to our greatest good?' Or do you see the transcendent as 'answering to our deepest craving, need, fulfilment of the good.'?
How we inhabit this space is related to the picture of the world we have, a picture that holds us captive precisely because it isn't conscious; it is the background to our thinking.
Key to this chapter's terms is his use of the 'Jamesian open space' referring to William James's description of an existentially 'open space where you an feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief.
Taylor suggests that to deny the pull to and fro of the existential winds is to 'spin' reality, to behave like a fundamentalist. The two options within the immanent frame then is to embrace the 'take' approach (that this is my 'take' of the wind) or to take the 'spin' option and shut down any nuance or 'take talk'.
The take talk is not something reasoned to as something reasoned from. It is an 'over-all sense of things' that 'anticipates or leaps ahead of the reasons we can muster for it. It is something in the nature of a hunch'.
He then critiques what he calls 'Closed World Structures' those people (usually secularists) who insist that the heavens are 'closed' and that's 'just the way it is'. They present their argument as being one of maturity and growing up, without recognising the objective truths that are necessary for that metaphor to bear weight:
But that is a story, not neutral date, and Taylor has been contesting such self-congratulatory stories all along.
This is a good insight into these CWS adherents:
The convert to the new ethics has learned to mistrust some of own deepest instincts, and in particular those which draw him to religious belief. The crucial change is the status accorded to the inclination to believe; this is the object of a radical shift in interpretation. It is no longer the impetus in us towards truth, but has become rather the most dangerous temptation to sin against the austere principles of belief-formation.
Within this world:
Anyone who wants to be 'with it' - who wants to share her friends' humanist concerns about justice - is going to feel pressured to abandon faith and adopt a 'closed' take.
With the demise of God after all, we are the only 'authorising agent left.'
This isn't a story we're convinced of; it is a basic orientation that seeps into our bones, into our social imaginary.
The pressure we feel rubbing against our inherited assumption of exclusive humanism are:
- Agency: the sense that we aren't just determined, that we are active, building, creating, shaping agents.
- Ethics: we have higher spiritual/ethical motives' that don't reduce to biological instinct or 'base' drives.
- Aesthetics: Art, nature moves' because of a sense of meaning; these are not just differential response to pleasure.
From Sin to Sickness
How we talk about the problem/tension we see/feel has shifted:
In the name of securing freedom, we swap submission to the priest for submission to the therapist.
Two Critiques of Religion
He address the criticism that religion falls foul of either or both of two problems:
1. by inviting us it 'transcend our humanity' it makes us deny what it means to be human
2. by promising that the world could be otherwise it papers over the difficult bits of our humanity.
What follows is a rebuttal to this critique that I found above my level of comprehension but Taylor's 'apologetic strategy' does come through. That strategy being:
First, level the playing field (for example by pointing out that both exclusive humanism and Christianity face dilemmas); second, show some of the inadequacy of purely 'immanentist' (this worldly) accounts, opening space for a Christian account to receive a hearing; and then, third, sketch how a Christian 'take' might offer a more nuanced or more comprehensive account of our experience.
What does it all mean?
We are creatures concerned with meaning. Everything we do has some goal or purpose attached to it and there is always a 'meta-question to be asked, that will haunt us'. This is the question 'what is the meaning of it all?' Concerning which Smith says:
This nasty existential genie cannot easily be put back in the bottle.
And so is a hard question, once asked, to suppress or ignore.
This is a question that emerges out of a sense that 'there are goals which could engage us more fully and deeply than our ordinary ends.' It is a 'sense' that
somewhere there is a fullness or richness which transcends the ordinary. This 'sense' will not easily be uprooted from the human heart.
That is part of why we should be nervous of exclusive humanism that tends to what to squash the question and make it something that we're not concerned with.
Sites of Unease; or the Restlessness of Exclusive Humanism
How do you make someone more moral? You cannot do it by simply creating codes of conduct or policies or informal 'political correctnesses'. Knowing what the right code of conduct is only helps in some narrow circumstance, it won't help when two codes seem to come into conflict. The bigger problem however is that codes don't touch on the dynamics of moral motivation:
It was not a code or a rule that produced forgiveness in Nelson Mandela.
What's missing in modern moral philosophy, Smith says, is attention to motivation.
Clearly moving higher in the dimension of reconciliation and trust involves a kind of motivational conversion - and no code can bring that about... In other words, modernity can't have what it wants on its own terms.
It's own terms being without appealing to a higher, objective, meta reason for morality.
What Taylor wants to do is to level the playing field to show that simply looking to the closed-heavens/this-world for answer to the restlessness and longings in our souls won't help. We are, he says, haunted by 'the spectre of meaninglessness' and this ghost keeps pressing and pulling and generating 'unease' and 'restlessness'.
The goal of naming this problem isn't so much to say that Christianity provides the perfect solution and an end to all our wrestling but to say that Christianity's 'open' take on the world allows for it and helps us be honest about this dis-ease.
The unease and restlessness manifest itself in two domains of modern experience: time and death.
a. time
The secular attitude to time is simply concerned with the chronological tick-tock passing of time. Two ways we shape time and so shape our world is with: cycles and narratives.
We orient ourselves with reference to the 'cycles' of time. This helps us create rhythms of intensity and rest. These routines of time (weekday and 'festival' weekend, holidays, rites of passage etc.) help frame our lives
We also 'gather' time in narrative and story. National stories, ages of personal development, public commemoration in which we narrate over and over again.
But both of these strategies to time are destabilised by the spectre of meaninglessness.
There's only so long we can continue performing these stories before we're caught off guard by the reality that since there's no 'higher' meaning to our lives we're just papering over an abyss; we're only making it up.
There seems to be something here that we just can't shake - that no amount of 'rational' atheism seems to be able to excise. Might its persistence be reason to think that there's something to this?
b. Death
Another phenomenon that tips toward the case for an 'open' heaven is our attitude toward death. Here we find another inner, immovable desire for eternity - even at secular funerals...
...this doesn't show that the faith perspective is correct. It just shows that the yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as.
Conclusion: Conversion
In the final chapter Taylor points to converts from secularism as final evidence that we ought to concede that the heavens may indeed be open after all.
