Taylorisation

Pressing on with A Secular Age , I’m into Part 2, ‘The Turning Point’. It comprises two sections, ‘Providential Deism’ and ‘The Impersonal Order’. This, in other words, is the hinge upon which we’ve turned, in the West, from a ‘religious’ to a ‘secular’ social logic: replacing the exterior-to-humankind anchor point of God (who sometimes called upon us to ‘detach ourselves from [our] own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of the self, or of renunciation of human fulfilment’ [p17]) with a ground located within the world, and therefore within ourselves. Two things, then: ‘Deism’ and ‘order’, the latter a shift from ‘orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent interacting with humans and intervening in human history’ to ‘God as an architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws’ [p.270]. Righty ho. I had trouble with Taylor’s use of ‘Deism’ in Part 1, since he seemed to be giving too much emphasis to a movement that was, whilst real, rather minor and elitist at the time...

Reading Taylor’s Part 1 ‘The Work of Reform’, and following his account of how modern, secular society—how the modern, secular state—emerged out of earlier, religiously framed social structures, I started to wonder if something was missing. I say so tentatively, since this is an area in which I am not an expert. But neither am I complete noob, so …you know. So: Taylor talks in terms of ‘the rise of the disciplinary society’ (it’s the title of his chapter 2). He diagnoses a change in the way ‘people’ thought of the world around them: a ‘series of shifts’ that ‘cumulatively take the master description of the world as ens creatum in a radically different direction’, towards a situation in which ‘all intrinsic purpose having been expelled, final causation drops out and efficient causation alone remains.’ (p.97-98). This, says Taylor, entails a ‘mechanisation of the world picture’; ‘we trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent mac...

  My first encounter with Taylor’s Secular Age book was via my friend Alan Jacobs' article ‘ Fantasy and the Buffered Self ’ [ New Atlantis , Winter 2014], which I commend to you. It’s gratuitous of me to summarise that article, when the link is right there, and the piece itself so elegantly written and compelling, but I’m going to do so anyway, as a way-in to thinking about Taylor’s distinction between ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’ sensibilities. Here's how it starts: When asked by the editors of the website The Immanent Frame to summarize the key concerns of his vastly ambitious book A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor wrote: “Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less ‘enchanted’ world. We might think of this as our having ‘lost’ a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But...

  Part 1 of A Secular Age is called ‘The Work of Reform’ and is disposed into five chapters: ‘The Bulwarks of Belief’; ‘The Rise of the Disciplinary Society’; ‘The Great Disembedding’; ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ and ‘The Spectre of Idealism’. What is being laboriously reformed in Part 1? Society and the belief-systems that undergird it. Taylor’s narrative concerns the circumstances underpinning the shift from a basically religious to a basically secular society, but (to quote Michael Morgan ) this is ‘not a history of doctrines or theories’ but rather ‘a history of the background conditions that made various doctrinal and practical ways of life possible’ what Taylor calls the ‘social imaginaries’ of lived experience: sensibilities, frameworks of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, worldviews, ‘the self-understandings of our social existence’. There are lots of ideas in this (book-length!) chunk of prose, but two are of particular importance, and, I'd say, influence. One is th...

  Right at the beginning of A Secular Age Taylor makes the assertion, which underpins much of what follows, that there was an earlier age in which ‘the political organisation’ was ‘connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality’ where ‘the modern Western state is free from this connection.’ I’m not fond, to be honest of the addition of ‘some notion of ultimate reality’, here, which seems to me to me tendentious, even a bit slippery. For one thing I challenge Taylor to name a pre-secular society grounded in anything other than God[s], however God[s] was/were conceived—which is to say: to name a pre-secular society that pledged allegiance to a non-personified ‘notion of ultimate reality’ like an 18 th -century Deist rather than a good old-fashioned God or pantheon of Gods (I know he has quite a bit to say about Deism later in the book). The phrase though, or variants of it, recur through the introduction: public spaces ...

  Taylor’s ‘Introduction’ sets out the questions his big book hopes to answer. He claims we live now in a ‘secular age’ whereas we used to live in a ‘religious age’—impossible to disagree about this I think—and wants to know how this change came about. The earlier age was one in which ‘the political organisation’ was ‘connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality’ where ‘the modern Western state is free from this connection.’ He’s intrigued that it used to be impossible to dis believe in God, in the sense that social sanction compelled the public profession of belief, whereas now it’s perfectly fine to declare oneself an atheist. Earlier than that, before the ‘official’ combination of society and religion of (say) the European Middle Ages, Taylor, in passing, posits archaic societies in which the distinctions between religion, politics, economics, society and so on simply did not apply: ‘in these earlier societies, re...