Called to question

The Tablet Interview

Peter Kavanagh meets the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who has been awarded the prestigious 2007 Templeton Prize, recognising groundbreaking work with a spiritual dimension. His field of study is proving ever more relevant as the twenty-first century unfolds

An encounter with Charles Taylor is really all about questions. As a philosopher, as a citizen and as a Catholic he has built a life around them. In particular, he is interested in questions about identity, and the role of religion in society, and how these two categories of question are interconnected.

The award of the 2007 Templeton Prize to the Canadian philosopher for "Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities" is due recognition of a half-century's work that, while still in progress, has transformed the way these questions are thought about.  

Taylor thinks that neither the view that religion is all, nor the view that it is merely a delusion, is totally convincing. "There are certain questions you can't get away from such as the meaning of life, what is the source of goodness, what is really valuable in human life and so on. And nobody has the standard answer that can convince everybody else and everybody is asking these questions," he insists.

He sees the prize not only as an acknowledgement of the direction of his work, but as something that will allow him (at the age of 75) "the possibility of going much farther and faster".

The impression that stays with you when you have finished talking with Taylor (and you are never really finished talking with him as his voice and thoughts continue to reverberate) is a combination of gentleness, ease, depth and surprising optimism. For a scholar as deeply immersed as he is in the most difficult of problems, his sense that we can think and believe our way through even the most intransigent of conundrums is infectious. His own reflections on what people are looking for when they seek out gurus or mentors could be applied to him. "They are looking for a sort of direction. They can be struck by not just the doctrine but also the whole stance, moral and otherwise, of a certain person saying something. The Dalai Lama is a good example. He is really an extraordinary figure. He radiates something. It is that kind of thing people are looking for. A certain direction in a search that they can trust, partly because they were impressed by the way it was expressed, partly because the person impressed them. The impression is further strengthened by the man's track record."

Charles Taylor's own track record is that rare combination of thinker and doer. While he demurs at the notion that people turn to philosophers for help finding the direction to their lives, he clearly demonstrates by his deeds that philosophers need to engage. And he has, and does.

He was educated at McGill University in Montreal, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he studied under Isaiah Berlin, and a fellow at All Souls, before returning to his alma mater, where he taught for nearly 40 years. He has delivered some of the most distinguished lectures in academia and written numerous works and essays to great acclaim. But as impressive as his scholarly work is, when he is asked to identify who influenced Charles Taylor he strikes a more literary chord. "Personally the novels of Dostoevsky tremendously influenced me. There is a certain perception of the human condition and spirituality that I found very moving."

In Canada he has long been a star intellectual, delivering the Massey Lectures, "The Malaise of Modernity", in 1991. Beyond the world of ideas, he is known as being more than willing to try ideals out in the public sphere. He ran for Parliament four times, even once against the young Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He agreed to jump into the middle of a large public controversy in February of this year, prior to being awarded the Templeton in March and after a series of incidents suggesting that immigrants and religious minorities were unwelcome in the predominantly white Catholic province of Quebec. He was asked by the Quebec Premier Jean Charest to co-chair a public inquiry into "Reasonable Accommodation of Immigrants and Minorities".

There is a deep link between his ongoing interest in identity and how different identities live together in society. "The answer is here in Canada and Quebec. We are sometimes liked for it and sometimes disliked for it. I mean the parts of Europe who are turning against multiculturalism, like Germany or Holland. I've been addressed like this in Europe where they say, ‘It is all your fault, you folks started all this'. As far as they are concerned we're the people who started this terrible, terrible virus going, which they see as tearing their society apart. And there are people on the other hand who say, ‘Wonderful, bravo, you guys have got some interesting ideas'."

Being born an Anglophone in Quebec in the heart of a country built by immigration was as important to his stature as a leading thinker in the field of multiculturalism as was studying with the master of liberalism, Isaiah Berlin.

"Reasonable accommodation", for Taylor, isn't simply accepting anything and everything that another culture brings. He believes that in Western liberal societies there are fundamentals, such as equality, rule of law and freedom of speech, that need simply to be accepted. "Part of the mythology in most countries about the dangers of immigrants is that they imagine that this isn't the case. People come here partly because they already accept these things and partly because they are willing to accept these things as part of the package."

He thinks problems arise when the majority interprets what any particular custom means. He uses the issue of the headscarf and the veil as an example, pointing out that most Westerners believe these are rooted in inequality. "But is that so? Maybe in some very distant way it is connected to different ideas about gender roles but if you ask some of the kids who want to wear the headscarf, in some cases they wanted to affirm their identity against their parents. They wanted a sense of what their own stance in life was. Or they wanted to grow a little bit in their faith. So to listen to them, it is not an inequality between men and women that is at the centre of what is happening." For Taylor the question is: as a liberal society do we assign the value, or does the person practising the custom?

Growing up in Quebec has not only influenced Taylor's ideas about multiculturalism. It has also had a formative influence on the type of Catholic he is. "I was very influenced by a certain Catholic theology that was the foundation of Vatican II but I happened to hook on to it before Vatican II. That was the advantage of growing up in Quebec. These theologians were French: Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac ... these were really crucial people whose ideas were circulating in Quebec, as it were, before they were in the rest of the world because of its link with France."

Religion plays a key role in the question of "reasonable accommodation" though until recently less so in Canada. Yet around the world where cultures and communities clash, often religion seems at the root of the conflict, and many of us wonder about the fervour of religious antagonism. Not Taylor though, who sees the present as much less violent than the past. "If you go back to the wars of religion, the split between Catholics and Protestants, you might find people trying to bridge the gap. But most people had these very firm ideas and were willing to go into battle for it. Today, there are some people like that, most notably people in very important movements that are stirring up violence. But lots and lots and lots of people are searching today and recognise that they have to listen to other searchers and they don't want to line up in that way and hate and fight everyone who has another view."

More troubling to Professor Taylor than the world's interreligious conflicts is the broader cultural war between secularism and science. "I mean if you take a position like that of a [Richard] Dawkins, anybody who has any religious belief is a potential danger. Because at worst or at the very least they are encouraging other people who are eventually going to flip over into violence, because the thing is seen as inherently violent. And there are people on the other side who believe that if you are an atheist you have to be a friend of Joe Stalin or have to be ready to commit violence in the other direction. For most of the rest of us it is not entirely clear what makes some people think that their religion or ideology justifies or even pushes them to violence."

Another question, then. But this, for Taylor, is exactly as it should be: "I think any position that tries to delegitimise the questions or pretends all the questions are answered already, such that you don't have to go on thinking, then you have somebody who is so totally off beam and doesn't understand a thing that is going on in human history."

For those struggling to come to terms with the role of spiritual thinking in the twenty-first century, then, here is a guide with impeccable credentials.