"A Secular Age": Introduction

 

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 disbelieve 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, religion was “everywhere”, was interwoven with everything else, and in no sense constituted a separate “sphere” of its own’. (p.2)

Now obviously A Secular Age is vast, full of detail, committed throughout to try and apprehend the ‘social imaginaries’ it is exploring with as much nuance as possible; and I’d say (from having dipped into the book before, and from reading accounts of it) that for Taylor this shift from a religious to a secular age must account for the fact that the God people used to have to believe in is still there in some sense—as a man of faith himself, he’s obviously not going to be happy with an argument that boils down to ‘all those early men and women were suckers, and now we know better’. And it’s interesting to me that he also repudiates what he calls ‘subtraction narratives’, the Wordsworth’s immortality ode myth of human development, that we used to have access to the authentic numinous and now we’ve somehow, inexplicably lost it—shades of the prison house cast, perhaps, by materialism, capitalism, science, selfishness or sin.

Nonetheless I think it’s worth at least sketching out the naive view that Taylor considers beneath his notice: the vulgar narrative that puts the emphasis not on strategies of human flourishing but on strategies of human comprehension. After all, we know a lot more about a lot more things nowadays than did archaic man, who lacked any understanding of Newton’s laws, germ theory etc. Mightn’t this fact, on its own, cut the gordian knot of Taylor’s big question?

So instead of a model of archaic men and women inhabiting a world, as Taylor proposes, in which religion was everywhere interwoven with everything else, I’m going to float a model in which religion develops, in its earliest form, as a separate magisterium from most of the business of living. Because I think this throws a different light on his way of framing his questions.

The argument would go like this. Start by hypothesising that animals don’t have ‘religion’ in the sense that Charles Taylor does. This means that, at some point on our evolutionary path, we humans began to develop it. Then: speculate that this happened in order to provide an explanation for the inexplicable, and that as our consciousnesses and mental capacity grew over the long-timescales upon which evolution works, ‘the inexplicable’—and its already attendant modus explicatus, religion—came to colonise more and more of our lived experience, until eventually we reached a time when it seemed common-sense to people that religion stood as the explanation for everything.

So: there are many aspects of our lives that don’t present to us as mysterious—or more precisely if these aspects sometimes present to some of us today (philosophers, say) as mysterious, that’s only because habits of thought have developed in which we deliberately set out to challenge everything we assume, and refuse to take anything on trust. But most people are not Wittgenstein, and this non-Wittgensteinness was surely truer of early man than it is true of modern man. So I repeat myself: there are many aspects of our lives that don’t present to us as mysterious. You are hungry. You eat, and you stop being hungry. That, for early man, is not a mystery. It may be a practical challenge (how to find food) but it is not a puzzle that food stops us feeling hungry. That’s just what food does, it’s just the way things are.

I’d suggest a piece of evidence that this has been so for much of human existence is to be found in the observation that no culture has developed a god of hunger. Cultures have certainly developed gods of food—the Greek Demeter, say; or the Christian shepherd-and-fisherman god Jesus—but not because food is a mystery as such, but rather because food supply is uncertain, and this uncertainty is a worry and (therefore) a puzzle. The puzzle begins in the practical: what can we do to ensure that our food supply continues, so we don’t starve? (Perhaps we can, in effect, speak to the manager, identify who’s in charge and propitiate him/her). Once this step is taken, it expands backward (as it were) into the conceptual. That’s my speculation, at any rate.

In other words, the function of the gods, for early man, was not a Taylorian business of maximising fulfilment via an external focus, so much as it was a way of explaining the otherwise unexplainable. Lightning strikes are alarming and inexplicable; ‘Zeus’ is an explanation that carries with it the twin practical advantages of reducing those anxieties that attend ignorance and of providing us with a (spurious of course, but perhaps that matters less than one might think) mode of addressing the danger—for by propitiating Zeus we can hope to avoid being struck by lightning.

Beast-life, in this model, would be godless: the dynamic of appetite and the satisfaction of appetite, a focus of avoiding danger and locating prey and so on. Gods enter upon the scene when things need—need in an evolutionary sense: the sense in which finding answers starts to provide an evolutionary advantage—to be explained. There is no god of fucking, because fucking—as fucking—is an animal appetite and an animal satisfaction, one we humans share with pigeons and horses and so on. But there are gods of fertility (for us, not for the pigeons) because once humans become aware of the relationship between fucking and babies, and more importantly once they become anxious at the prospect of not producing babies, or desirous of maximising the production of babies, or of ensuring their distinct paternity, a god becomes both explanation for this strange causal propinquity and site of propitiation for its uncertainties. Once gods have become common in our understanding of the universe, once humans are used to seeing the world as full of them, then a god of fucking (call her Aphrodite) becomes retrofitted back into the pantheon. But there’s little doubt that fertility fetishes, and potency/fertility gods and goddesses, predate these later retcons. [1]

Similarly: there is no god of anger as such, since anger is an animal passion. But once anger becomes socialised and codified into war—with all its thrills, uncertainties and anxieties—well then we get war gods. The thesis in other words is that the grit around which these pearlescent gods grow, in the oyster shells of human society, is an substantive uncertainty, and the function they serve is twofold: one, explanation in terms both of how and why (‘what is that alarming lightning strike?’ ‘It is God throwing thunderbolts.’ ‘But why does God do so?’ ‘He is punishing those who stand against him!’) and two, an opportunity of controlling, or averting, the uncertainty (‘to avoid being struck by lightning, we must propitiate God.’)

This theory is predicated on humankind being defined as humankind insofar as they have evolved a beyond-beast will-to-understanding, a curiosity, an unhappiness about the unexplained, the uncertain, and a satisfaction in finding both how and why explanations for things. It depends, indeed, upon seeing humans as centrally invested in making sense of things, in a way not true of other animals. I’m aware this sounds like a scientist’s idealisation of humankind (though I am not a scientist), but it's surely logical, in terms of our survival, to say that we have collectively evolved both the desire and some of the capacity to anticipate risk, danger etc. But I’m aware that not everybody would concur with this as a ‘definition’ of what it means to be human, or what separates us from the animals.

By this account, then, religion is separate from the rest of the business of existing, in the first instance: ‘how do we turn these grains of wheat into bread?’ is an uncertainty that is not addressed by saying: ‘we must propitiate the gods’, but rather by practical strategies of threshing, winnowing etc. On the other hand, ‘how do we ensure rain falls on our wheatfields so the crops don’t die?’ is an uncertainty that, for most of human history, has provoked in us a supernatural response. Or so I’d guess.

I wonder if these two things, explanation and propitiation, could be proposed as alternatives to the argument Taylor develops. So, A Secular Age is very interested in the question of humankind’s (innate, Taylor seems to suggest) orientation toward something ‘beyond human flourishing’, beyond the simple animal-selfish gratifications and towards Buddhist annihilation of self and Christian and Muslim individual and collective self-sacrifice. But I’d suggest that these things grew, perhaps, out of the propitiation aspect of the earliest forms of gods makes sense to me, since propitiation had to incur a cost to be worthwhile, and inflation is a property that touches human emotional and psychological lives just as it does economics.

Now, my explanation may be hooey.[2] But if there’s anything in it, it provides one big (simple, or if you prefer over-simplistic) answer to Taylor’s big question: why did we move from a religious to a secular society? Because secular discourses of science proved better at explaining things than the earlier religious discourses did, at least on the level of ‘how’. I honestly don’t think that’s a controversial thing to claim. Physics is manifestly better at explaining lightning strikes than ancient Greek theology, and can give us better advice on how to avoid being hit by them too. People who still cleave to religious worldviews would, perhaps, point to the paucity of convincing ‘why’ explanations in science, but in evolutionary terms ‘how’ explanations are likely to be of more immediate, hands-on use than ‘why’ ones.

But if this explanation has anything in it, it entails a number of problems. For instance, if I’m right that one of the social and personal ‘functions’ of gods was to offer explanations for things, to enhance our sense (even if spuriously) that we understood how the larger world worked, then it seems strange to me that the polarity of ‘God’ as a concept has flipped about so completely, such that nowadays it is a benchmark of faith that God is radically non-understandable, that He is beyond our capacity to reason, prove, or reduce to logic, that He is a profound mystery and so on. That (the flip-about, I mean) seems a little … odd, I suppose. But perhaps this is less odd than I’m suggesting. Empirically it is the case that people otherwise not especially religious turn to ‘God’ when the regular rhythms of their mundane life are disrupted, for instance by sufferings or bereavements that doesn’t make sense—that are inexplicable—in existential terms. In these circumstances ‘God’ fills the same function it may have done for early man.

Again, I’m aware that this approach, by starting to talk about God as a function, premises discussion on a notion of God conceived instrumentally, which will not convince people of faith for whom God is the ground of existence as such, not a mere advantageous addition to individual or collective existences. Nonetheless I think it connects—perhaps I only think it connects—with another thing Taylor says in his introduction.

So he concedes that his term ‘secular’ is a problem (‘I have been struggling with the sense of “secular” and “secularity”, 14), and in this introduction is content to leave it gestured-towards, to be fleshed-out as he goes on, rather that trying to pin things down more precisely (or faux-precisely). That’s fine. But he does go some way towards definition, by breaking the term down into ‘three modes’. Those three are: [1] replacing faith with ‘reason’, especially a kind of reification of reason as the only way to live, to order society etc (‘the Kantian form is the most upfront about this: we have the power as rational agency to make the laws by which we live—this is something so greatly superior to the force of mere nature in us, in the form of desire, that when we contemplate it without distortion we cannot but feel reverence’, p.8). Then [2] ‘Nature’—I think Taylor is thinking of Romanticism here: ‘Reason’ is desiccated and inwards, Nature seen as a value that transcends the individual, an outward-focused source of virtue (‘Reason by itself is narrow, blind to the demands of fullness’; the critique of ‘Reason’ locates the sources of its power not in anything transcendent but ‘in Nature, or in our own inner depths, or in both’ p.9). Taylor’s [3] is, I suppose, ‘postmodernism’, that ‘scoffs at the claims of self-sufficient reason’ but ‘offer[s] no outside source for the reception of power’ (p.10). All three, by Taylor’s reading, tend inward, where religious flourishing (he says) has an outward focus. The intro ends with him restating this distinction in terms of a transcendence/ immanence distinction.

 

‘We have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside or “beyond” human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of different ways) “within” human life.’ [15]

 

… where ‘fullness’, here (slightly evasively, maybe?) is defined by Taylor as his ‘shorthand term here for the condition we aspire to,’ but for which ‘there is no perfect terminological solution’ in terms of definition, such that with ‘reservations’ Taylor is prepared to ‘let the word stand.’ The danger is that this conflates two modes of positive existential experience: the epiphanic spot-of-time moment Taylor quotes (via Griffith) in p.5, and a blander positive mode of day-to-day existence, fulfilled and content—chronos as opposed to the other kind of ‘fullness’s’ kairos, to use Frank Kermode’s terms. ‘Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.’ [p.5]

Anyway I think his three-fold anatomy of ‘secularism’, ‘Reason’ / ‘Nature’ / ‘Postmodernism’, is insufficient, really. Maybe Taylor expands upon it as his book continues, but it seems to me on its face to omit what are, actually, the major iterations of secular existence nowadays, none of which are really predicated upon these three—kinds of contemporary secular existence that (we might think, aping earlier religious communal life) cultivate this kind of fullness precisely by fixing on an outwardness rather than an inwardness. I’m talking about those people nowadays who find their fullness through belonging to a group of like-minded people, focused on politics (say) or on one of the various fandoms that exist (eg SF), on music, or sports—watching or playing. This is most people, I think, and it is neither merely rational, nor Romantic Nature-ism—nor, although given our historical moment, there’s a lot of pomo ironic posturing and code-switched etc, is it actually ironic. People who are passionate about music, going to gigs and festivals, listening to it, reading about it etc, are fixing a value on something outside themselves, something that enables communitarian connection and one-ness (Nietzsche etc), not as rational actors but quasi-religious but secular fans.

 

Anyway, I think it’s worth laying all this out, like this, if only because the topics A Secular Age addresses are (important) things to which we all come with priors, biases, of one kind or another. Taylor (so far as I can tell) isn’t interested in paleological religion, or pre-history—his historical scope is, really, medieval-to-modern, with occasional looks-back to classical Rome. Plenty to be getting on with, just on that timescale, no question. And obviously I shouldn’t second-guess him, but I suspect that one of his priors is—the long history of human religion is one where we go from ‘earlier societies [in which] religious was “everywhere”, was interwoven with everything else, and in no sense constituted a separate “sphere” of its own’, to early modernity when religion was not separate from society and politics but had become in some sense reified or alienated from some aspects of day-to-day life, to our modern secular separated-out world. It makes sense that Taylor would think this, because (I presume) he considers religion ‘true’, and regards belief in God as a justified belief; and the large-scale narrative of human existence as been a path from existence being suffused in God to a kind of complicated new secularised orientation makes sense in that frame. But these are not my priors. That fact alone may get in the way of me being able to do proper justice to Taylor’s ideas, I know.

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[1] I’m no expert (of course) but so far as I can see historians of the prehistoric roots of religion argue something along these lines: religious praxis, so far as we can tell, begins with the use of small fetish objects and representational images (like cave paintings). These are mostly of [a] curvaceous female forms and [b] animals—the former as a focus for devotional activity designed to ensure fertility, and the latter to increase the chances of success in the hunt. Penates, or ‘household gods’—also fetish objects—developed later as a focus for devotional activity to ensure the safety and sanctity of the home. These latter were a very long-lived religious cultus: Vergil is still invoking them at around the time of Christ’s birth. (Ancestor worship also has a place here, although I'm not sure anyone quite knows where exactly). From here, gods were later imagined as personified externalities, often (there’s a continuity here I suppose) in the form of a superior kind of animal being—dog-, stag- or lion-headed figures let’s say. Purely human-like gods were a later development. The more rarefied notion of ‘One God’, initially a strange heresy of the Jews, came very much later.

[2] I haven’t encountered this thesis precisely argued in any of the histories of religion I have read, although I haven’t read very many—there’s such a lot of this material, I’ve only glanced at some of it, and may be spouting nonsense. Also, looking even briefly into all this stuff makes me realise the extent to which it's all educated guesswork and speculation anyway, because there’s almost no hard evidence. So far as I can see the most influential anthropological theory of how religions arose nowadays is the one advanced in Stewart Elliott’s Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press 1995) and Justin Barrett’s ‘Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4:1 (2000): 29–34. Barrett posits not a will-to-curiosity (as I’m doing here), but rather what he calls a ‘hyperactive agency detection device,’ or HADD, as an explanation for the origins of religious beliefs. ‘The HADD is a cognitive module which evolved to scan the environment for signs of agency, such as twigs breaking in nearby woods, in order to alert an individual to opportunity or danger. Because fellow agents are key sources of both danger and of aid, they are profoundly relevant for fitness, and, as such, our brains evolved to be hypersensitive to cues of agency. As a result, the default calibration of the human mind produces more false positive alarms than false negatives. In other words, it is better to wrongly impute, say, an imaginary tiger in the nearby bushes than to fail to identify a real one. Equipped with the HADD, the reasoning goes, human minds can scarcely avoid coming up with supernatural agent beliefs, since they are incessantly scaring up thoughts of invisible agents’ [Connor Wood and John H. Shaver ‘Religion, Evolution, and the Basis of Institutions: The Institutional Cognition Model of Religion’ Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2:2 (2018), 3]. Wood and Shaver, there, note the wide influence this ‘HADD’ model has exerted on subsequent theorising about the origins of religion: for instance in Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002) and Robert N McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (2013).