Outline: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, Deep Dive
Outline of key themes and arguments from the book, as well as verbatim key quotes
Part 1 podcast available on Apple and Spotify
Part 2 podcast available on Apple and Spotify
Part 1
Intro (00:00:38)
The Context of Secularity (00:17:40)
Deserts vs the Ordered Society (00:23:36)
Utopia and the New Social Code (00:35:15)
Monks and Microsoft Excel (01:02:25)
Individualism (01:15:46)
Closing (01:30:35)
“The individual seems primary, because we read the displacement of older forms of complementarity as the erosion of community as such. We seem to be left with a standing problem of how to induce or force the individual into some kind of social order, make him conform and obey the rules” (169) – Charles Taylor
Potential critiques of Taylor: is he right? Is he on to something?
- Myopic, too focused on Christianity, and too caught up in the modern age
- No cause given
Key insights:
- Too much emphasis on and too much asked of the individual
o No hierarchy, so no social authority outside of the individual
o Cut ourselves off from the past, both ancestors and primordial time
o No ideals, no blueprints, especially moral
- Darwin didn’t kill god
o There was a moral change, not just intellectual
o Broader context
- Compulsion to create heaven on earth, to democratically/politically establish the moral world we think best
Secularity (00:17:40)
3 definitions of Secularity: How many atheists are there, how central is religion to the society, and what options are available to the individual in a particular society?
Doxastic voluntarism: How much is the belief in God up to our choice?
Are we emphasizing belief in religion too much today?
Deserts vs Order (00:23:36)
Society is ordered, the wild or wilderness is not. Human world vs nature
“Wilderness and desert places could be seen as in a sense unfinished, that is, not yet fully brought into conformity with the shaping Ideas. In ancient Babylon, ‘wild’, uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-creation” (335).
Deserts are the abode of dangerous forces, beasts, demons
Bible Examples:
- Exodus story – Israelites forced to wander in the desert, they cannot build a city, they cannot create order for themselves
- Mark and Isaiah: John the Baptist prepares the way for Jesus. Jesus goes into the wilderness to be tempted.
But beyond this, for Christians, “breaking out of the confines of the all-too-human order can be a condition of finding God” (336)
Social order and new strict social moral code (00:35:15)
Contemporary social order
- No hierarchy
- Expectation to create the order we expect in the world
- Relentless code
In past, society was hierarchical, but there were rituals of reversal, where societies in the past took a day/moment to highlight the baselessness of the order, but also reestablish it at the same time. He called these a blowoff valves. The social hierarchy is necessary but not the ultimate, the community is the ultimate. So in certain rituals roles are reversed, “king for a day”, so the group understands the order is there for the community, not for order’s sake.
Starting around 1500, begin to see, as part of this belief that we could “build”/establish the moral order, which gets played out in universal justice. This is derivative of the Christian agape. Think the good Samaritan. He did not owe the stranger anything, but through his idea of a “super-community” he did. The action was not based on a per-existing solidarity; it was built. Good for goodness’ sake. But by default, that means pre-existing ties shouldn’t matter. So we did not go from religious concern for others to selfishness. But to a human-initiated benevolence. Burned-over district was filled with people trying to convert as many people as possible.
Contrast this general view with Augustine: we’re depraved and unworthy, only by God’s grace are we saved. Additionally, the city of god was parallel to the city of man, god’s ordering wasn’t in the world; god was separate.
Social reform: more democracy, but also individualistic. It wasn’t just that a few select were saved, but that we must reform society so as many as possible can be saved. And need to immanentize.
Jesus says to disown your family if they become a stumbling block.
When people are first free right-bearing individuals (vs social), then they can have a “rational” basis to be regarded outside of the state and outside of their family.
But now policy is dictated by the people, the whims of the people (the public sphere) stand outside of the state/power. You can have a set of individuals, “a society outside the state” (191). But now this “association” has no basis other than itself, it is purely self-referential. It does not refer to anything outside of itself.
Today’s “social” code is simply for itself. As such, there can be no moments of reprieve. The expectation is that we all be saints. As such, there is now no new outlet where we can get out from under the (now) self-imposed moral code. Taylor worries that by default, that outlet is simply the private life. We can do anything we want, privately.
Public sphere, consensus. As we become more democratic, as society comes to consist of non-hierarchically related individuals, social science was necessary. We need to know what the population thinks so that we can carry out its wishes.
Taylor says something like Deism was necessary as a stepping stone. But then when shit kind of worked out, all of the sudden we had material conditions that supported the view. God wasn’t needed (257).
Commerce and Mobilization (01:02:25)
Taylor follows Weber and mostly signs up for the Protestant work ethic, where we have a calling, where we get meaning from our job. This is a very “this-world” view of meaning.
Economic activity, ordered, peaceful, productive, becomes more and more the model for human behavior: if god wants us to flourish, and economic productivity leads to flourishing *in this world*, then we should do economic things.
As such, there is also a need to develop “polite” or civilized society. Drunkeness, violence, those are bad because we need sober, docile citizens to make the economy run. Religious zeal now becomes “enthusiasm” and is to be avoided. And the monk/ascetic is no longer lifted up. Rather those impulses get harnessed in Microsoft excel. But notice it is still praised: the quietist, focused, autistic individual is still elevated, but only as a part of the economy, only so long as the monk is a productive monk.
A mobile humanity means we are less rooted to a location and to other people. This is an issue because religion historically was closely tied to your community.
Individualism (01:15:46)
Emphasis is now on self-reliance, self-reference, pure will, rational agent without attachment. You should not be defined by your social connections (not a brother, son, etc)
“Excarnation, a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head’ (554). The “turn inward” was taking place within religion, as we went from an emphasis on rituals/acts to contemplation of god and eventually just salvation by faith.
While we’ve been heading down the individualist track for awhile now, only recently have we seen the proliferation of expressive individualism. This has informed and resulted from: “affluence and the continued extension of consumer life styles; social and geographic mobility; outsourcing and downsizing by corporations; new family patterns, particularly the growth of two-income households, with the resulting overwork and burnout; suburban spread whereby people often live, work, and shop in three separate areas; the rise of television” (473). Taylor published this in 2007, well before the proliferation of the internet and social media.
The problems motivating the movies, Office Space (1999), The Matrix (1999), Flight Club (1999), Idiocracy (2006) have not been addressed in any way.
Self-expression includes sexuality, which gains momentum by emphasizing “choice” and “freedom”, which are the core values of our new American religion. Taylor is right to point out just how significant this change is. In less than 100 years, something that was law such as women’s suffrage, would not even be thinkable to overturn. And he published this before gay marriage was legal in the US. But how easy is it to defend your political stance by simply tapping the “choice” sign. If you view the rights movement as the new religion, suddenly the push makes more sense.
Taylor argues that the lifting of sexual restrictions has greatly affected religions and religious affilation. The best support for his view is that gay rights may be the Mormon church’s greatest challenge in 2022 going forward. Few religions have been able to build as insulated and cohesive of a community as the Mormons have, and even they are losing members due to the issue even as they have issued as soft of statements as they can on the matter without capitulating. In other words sexual freedom is a cultural current that is stronger than almost any other.
PART 2
Intro (00:00:54)
Morality and The Modern Therapeutic Authority (00:01:35)
Meaning and Our Conception of Time (00:23:45)
Religion Today and a Path Forward (01:02:10)
“… the disciplines of our modern civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be “wasted”. The result has been the creation of a tight, ordered time environment. This has enveloped us, until it comes to seem like nature. We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done” (59).
Therapy (00:01:35)
Again he has to tell an historical argument. It used to be like that and now it’s like this.
Moral quandaries, personal anxieties and indecisions were adjudicated and addressed through the church structure, through the use of a church authority, relying on a set of doctrine. But now, that structure isn’t there, so we see the advent of therapy.
“One of the most striking fruits of this sense of innate human innocence has been the transfer of so many issues which used to be considered moral into a therapeutic register. What was formerly sin is often now seen as sickness. This is the triumph of the therapeutic’” (618).
There is no moral lesson to learn from our psychic wounds, the goal is simply to “understand them in order to reduce their force, to become able to live with them” (621).
“Evil tends to be seen as exogenous, as brought on by society, history, patriarchy, capitalism, the ‘system’ in one form or the other. As David Martin put it, ‘the mobile, shifting, hedonistic, technicist’ mentality that one encounters in the dominant metropolitan culture today ‘ has no sense of personal guilt and yet possesses an excoriating sense of collective sin’” (618).
“casting off religion was meant to free us, give us our full dignity as agents; throwing off the tutelage of religion, hence of the church, hence of the clergy. But now we are forced to go to new experts, therapists, doctors, who exercise the kind of control that is appropriate over blind and compulsive mechanisms; who may even be administering drugs to us. Our sick selves are even more being talked down to, just treated as things” (620).
A consequence of this approach is that “the cure of these incapacities is held to involve our repudiation of, or at least distancing from, any aspirations to the transcendent” (622).
If human good, is the good, sacrificing for god doesn’t make sense. “Our hyper-Augustinian ancestors were part of a religious culture in which it was normal to find divine meaning in suffering and destruction” (653).
“how to define our highest spiritual or moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn’t crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity?” (640)
Meaning and Time (00:23:45)
There is no longer any view of sacred time, no foundational time. All times are the same, the big bang is 13 billion years ago, so outside of human time, but has nothing to do with us.
Because we now live in the age of flat time and that is unsettling “one way in which this has been met in our age is narrative, a more intense telling of our stories, as individuals and as societies” (714). We have to try to “gather” up the events in time, make sense of them on our own, because we no longer have a reference to sacred time/primordial time.
Theorists have claimed that “the age of Grand Narratives is over, that we cannot believe in these any more. But their demise is the more obviously exaggerated in that the post-modern writers themselves are making use of the same troupe in declaring the reign of narrative ended: ONCE we were intro grand stories, but NOW we have realized their emptiness” (717).
One of the key stories we tell ourselves is that we have advanced passed our ancestors. They believed in superstition, but we are smarter, and have surpassed them.
But while narratives have not left us, our current narratives are less and less operative. “the narratives of modernity encounter increasing doubt and attack… In part this is because the actual achievements of civilization – industrial wasteland, rampant capitalism, mass society, ecological devastation – begin to look more and more questionable” (718).
Along with a buffered self comes the feeling of being apart from the world, having transcended the world. But this can give us the sense of living behind a screen. It can lead to a “wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, empty, a multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence” (302).
“there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific good or value. One might die for God, or the Revolution, or the classless society, but not for meaning. [meaning as such] designates a universal” (679). This is consequence of what Jesus asks of us: the golden rule, to treat your neighbor as yourself, to put yourself in their shoes, to elevate the particular to the universal, to become Christ-like, to become a god. But the problem is, being god is hard. Following the rules/order is insanity-inducing. The Saints were often VERY tortured, of their own volution, but tortured nonetheless.
“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 is the kind of lack which can show p with adolescence, and be the original of an identiy crisis. But it can also show up later, as the basis of a mid-life crisis, where what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it. The things which mattered up to now fail” (307).
So at a societal level, we’ve told ourselves a story of progress, but now we look around and don’t see that. Silicon technology covered over this for a few decades, but not now. And now we see this panic.
Two answers: conservative: we need to go back/look to the past. Vs progressive: we’re just being impeded by external forces/others.
This malaise “tells us that this predicament was spiritually unstable, offering on one side motives not to go back to the earlier established faiths, and on the other, a sense of malaise, emptiness, a need for meaning” (302).
“cross-pressure” that Taylor emphasizes. We cannot go back. But the present is untenable.
Embedded in our perspective of ourselves is the idea that we have surpassed our ancestors, our irrational, superstitious ancestors. We are superior. So to look back to them for wisdom is almost a non-starter.
Religion Today (01:02:10)
Many today still desire the spiritual, but are seeking personal connection to it.
It is also tied to health, the two ideas we now combine with the concept of wellness.
Nevertheless, while “[t]he new framework has a strongly individualist component… this will not necessarily mean that the content will be individuating. Many people will find themselves joining extremely powerful religious communities” (516).
If part of our modern story is that we have surpassed our ancestors, well that is just a story. So perhaps we can change our story.