 | |||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
Book Review, 20 September 2007 Unstilled Human Longings
A Secular Age Charles Taylor is among the half-dozen leading philosophers in the English-speaking world. Raised in Montreal, associated with McGill University for most of his career, he studied at Oxford with Isaiah Berlin and Elizabeth Anscombe, returning later as professor of social and political theory. He ran for the Canadian federal parliament three times, famously losing in 1965 to Pierre Trudeau. Unusually for such an eminent philosopher, he is a Catholic. He was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize (US$1.5 million) for Progress towards Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. A Secular Age emerges from the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, which he delivered in 1999, expanded to constitute a volume of 850 pages. In Sources of the Self: the making of modern identity (1989), his previous big book, Professor Taylor argued that liberal theorists of personal identity, from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, neglect the individual's ties with others in community life. Life choices come to seem entirely up to the individual, equal in value, or simply arbitrary. Taylor makes a strong case for the presence in ordinary moral life of something like Plato's idea of the Good, however little acknowledged. A person's identity is defined by the bonds that constitute the context within which one tries to determine from case to case what is good: "To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand." A Secular Age carries the story further, into the question of the role of religion in constituting a person's identity. Since we live in a supposedly "secular" culture, the first thing is to see what that means. Accordingly, the book retells the story of "secularisation" in the modern West. It is a familiar story: "disenchantment" of the world that contained "relics and wood sprites"; withdrawal of religious belief into the individual's head at the Reformation; the advance of deism at the Enlightenment; and the disappearance of God in the course of nineteenth-century doubt and agnosticism. Taylor, however, differs from the well-known sociological theories, to which he often alludes, in that he does not accept, as they usually do, that "the human aspiration to religion" is inevitably dying out. A "secular" society is one in which one can engage fully in politics, for example, without encountering God: a "few moments of vestigial ritual or prayer barely constitute such an encounter today". Church and State are now separate: the exceptions, in Britain and Scandinavia, are "so low-key and undemanding as not really to constitute exceptions". While he accepts that religion has gradually been expelled from the public realm, Taylor contends that there is plenty of evidence of an ineradicable desire to respond to a transcendent reality. This contrasts, as of course Taylor is well aware, with most other societies across the globe. Nor does he have room to explore the unique case of the United States of America. Taylor wants to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, in the absence of any equivalent to the intellectual, cultural and imaginative surroundings in which pre-modern religion was quietly embedded. This is what he calls our "social imaginary": how we collectively sense what is normal and appropriate in our dealings with one another and with the world around us. This is something deeper and more diffused than philosophical theories or thought-out positions. There is, as he puts it, a "largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense that they have". When we turn our attention to things at this level then we find traces, vestiges, anticipations, and premonitions of what may fairly be regarded as religion, at least in the sense of a yearning or reference to something "out of this world". People who have little or no explicit religious belief are moved to know of dedicated believers, such as Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII and John Paul II, so Taylor notes. His repeated references to the effects of Princess Diana's death suggest that he may give too much credence to media-generated gloss on certain personalities and events. On the other hand, the witness of holy people is a classic sign, perhaps even the only irrefutable "proof", of God's existence. We are not necessarily as "modern" as we think we are. Taylor points to "certain moments of mass celebration which seem to take us out of the everyday". He mentions rock concerts but also "centres of pilgrimage", which "arise out of apparitions of the Virgin": listing Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje. While he inveighs against the loss of human scale in much modern urban architecture, he suggests that this perhaps motivates the "massive movement of people as tourists towards the still undamaged sites of earlier civilisations, with their temples, mosques, and cathedrals". Tourism could sometimes be an unconscious form of pilgrimage, an inarticulate longing for silence, beauty and order beyond everyday experience. Obviously, much of the secular outlook in our society is sustained by fairly small numbers of people, in the media and academic life. Yet, as Taylor says, so many of the works that move people are connected to our religious tradition: Bach, the Missa Solemnis, Dante and Dostoevsky. He cites the account that Dom Bede Griffiths gives of a quasi-mystical experience that he had as a boy, which becomes a kind of paradigm alluded to several times later in the book. He highlights certain poets, as bearers of transcendence; Robinson Jeffers, Charles Péguy and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Our sense of life may be deepened by experience of the wild, as Hopkins reminds him ("What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness?"). Taylor writes beautifully of the birth of a child: "this sense of awe, surprise, tenderness, which moves us to much when a new human being emerges". Death is "the paramount vantage point in which life shows its meaning". Today we connect death not with the judgement to be faced by the person dying but with the end of a loving relationship, which by its nature seems to call for eternity. We have not reached the stage of putting our dead out to be collected with the garbage. Even the awkwardness and embarrassment at so many funerals raises a question, which is of course rapidly suppressed. A heterogeneous list: in this secular age, that is to say, there are countless hints of something that transcends everyday life, however easy to deny, and difficult to accommodate within conventional religious institutions. Of course, as Taylor says, none of this can decide the issue between belief and unbelief; he is only reminding us, tactfully and optimistically, that "our modern culture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere".  |
||||||||||||||
