A Secular Age
Randal Marlin at Mercator : http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/a_secular_age/A Secular Age is a huge and hugely interesting work by Charles Taylor, a Canadian who has been called ” the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today”. It deals with some of the most important issues of our time. What place is there for the contribution of religious ideas, notably belief in God and God’s word, to our public discourse about social policy? It is a feature of contemporary existence that arguments based on biblical sources or pronouncements from the Vatican tend to be treated today as more or less inadmissible in serious academic discussion. They may be used for adornment, but not as proper authority standing alone; serious work has to be couched in secular language.
I have certainly found in a lifetime spent in academic philosophy that professional manners require that while faith can serve as inspiration, whatever it inspires has to pass through a secularising filter before it can be acceptable as a contribution to philosophy. So, for example, arguments about ethics and social policies relating to abortion cannot, in serious discussion, rest on religious authority.
But is it right that this should be so?
Charles Taylor’s book does not, as far as I can tell, give a direct negative answer to this question, but in a magisterial tracing of the many currents of thought that have led to our “secular age” he does retrieve the sense that this might be an open question. The central aim of his book, as he himself expresses it, is “to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith in the strong sense… the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other.”
Books attacking belief in God are best-sellers, and religious belief and practice have been on the defensive for many decades. What Taylor argues well is that the current impulses toward the marginalising of religion stem from a distorted idea of the respective roles of religion and science in the development of our current mind-set, or more particularly, our “social imaginary”, which he defines as the set of shared ideas that tell us how to relate to others and what things are possible to be accomplished.
According to the simplistic narrative he attacks, science has been responsible for all that is good and progressive in the modern world, while religion has offered a series of superstitions and roadblocks in the way of science. Opposition to Copernicus and Darwin are only two of the more conspicuous examples.
This narrative obscures many vital pieces of a more complicated, but more accurate, story of the roles of religion and science in the path from an age of faith to that of secularised reason. The fuller narrative, Taylor argues, needs to take account of the way in which religious belief inspired the search for scientific truth, and the way in which both religious and atheistic thinking produced internal struggles, strands of which impacted on the other group.
Fundamentalist Christianity has its counterpart in fundamentalist atheism, each side convinced of its own truth and closed off from admitting any possibility of truth on the part of the other view. Yet when their truth claims are put under the microscope neither side is entitled to the certainty it professes.
Taylor gives many examples of atheistic dogmatism from French and Russian revolutionaries, but I’ll add to his collection the brouhaha over the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial (to which Taylor alludes, though without developing the example) in which a biology teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted (successfully) for violating a statute against the teaching of evolution. Secular thinkers cheered the defeat accorded fundamentalist Christianity in the court of public opinion. But few of the cheerers know that the book at the centre of the debate, A Civic Biology was gravely defective in treating as scientific fact the superiority of the Caucasian race and promoting eugenic views based on bad science.
Among the especially valuable concepts Taylor employs, I would highlight his expression “exclusive humanism”. All too often, we accept the term “humanism” to mean ethics without God, and since one can have a highly laudable ethical set of views while not including belief in God, this acceptance seems reasonable.
But Taylor rightly notes that for the most part what is laudable in humanism is also compatible with belief in God. Moreover, belief in God gives a special incentive to love and make sacrifices for our neighbour. So we need to distinguish a humanism that includes belief in God from one that doesn’t, instead of freighting theism with all the bad things that have come out of it, while according it none of the good.Once we focus on the question: “What is it that disbelief in God makes possible that belief will not allow?” we may find that the humanism in question becomes less appealing. Using the word “humanism” to describe beliefs that more accurately warrant the term “exclusive humanism,” gives an unwarranted advantage to the unbeliever.
Throughout the book, Taylor produces arguments to show that ethical advances have been generated by religious believers and are not simply the result of atheistic materialism.
We moderns are able to think about our individuality and our autonomy differently from the world before Rene Descartes and the rise of rationalism. Hence God is often viewed as subject to laws perceived as necessary by the rational self. The God of Abraham yields to scientific necessity, and Deism results. The world is created like clockwork. It’s not a great step from there to wondering why God is needed at all, if science can tell us all we need to know.
Taylor traces many strands of thinking that result in our contemporary outlook. He is particularly interested in how it came to be that debatable matters came to be one-sidedly settled, not only in the minds of the intellectual elite, but also in the thinking of the masses. Those with a Christian training will recognise the old phenomenon of believing what one wants to believe, captured in Luther’s notorious saying, “reason is a whore.” Popular culture extols the kinds of things and way of life that Christianity treats as turning us away from God.
Atheism leaves us with a bleak world when we contemplate our death. Scientific materialism gives us a disenchanted world, along with the benefits of removing superstitions. Some poets sought refuge in nature and beauty. The French writer Albert Camus gives us one outlook in the stubborn refusal to accept the comforts that belief in transcendence provides. Taylor looks at many of the different responses to both theism and atheism in a sympathetic way, but always with sufficient appreciation for the attendant difficulties so that no final answer to the meaning of life emerges.
A recent visit to St Petersburg and the wealth of inspired art in the basilicas, particularly the Church of the Saviour of Spilt Blood, has reinforced my impression that Taylor has his finger on the pulse of our times. Russia has lived through an atheistic Communist phase and has rediscovered its inspirational roots with a new reverence for the treasures of its Orthodox past. Reverting to the name St Petersburg is one indication of this. But the Russian Museum also emphasises religious themes. It acknowledges the oppression of the serfs, but avoids any sense that the Revolution brought a new lasting vision. The invasion of capitalism has not succeeded any better, and one senses a search for a new vision, combined with an openness not seen for a long time.
This is a magnificent, very important study. It has its drawbacks, such as untranslated words, repetition, presumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, etc. The length is daunting but there is an excellent index, and Google can help a lot with the rest. There are so many sources enriching this work that it may be idiosyncratic to suggest some absences, but I did feel the book would have profited from a glance or two at Kierkegaard, Levinas and Jacques Ellul. There’s also a letter by Nietzsche in which he confesses to admiration of Christianity but finds it too difficult. These other sources would reinforce Taylor’s history of our social imaginary. The upshot is that this social imaginary needs to be examined and re-examined in the light of how it came to be what it is and where it is.
Randal Marlin teaches philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.
