Benevolence and the Jets

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 (Unitarianism, for example, was much more widely believed and impactful in the UK across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries). But the ‘Providential Deism’ leads me to believe he doesn’t mean ‘Deism’ as it actually manifested in this period, or perhaps that he’s using that term as a historical hook from which to hang a much more capacious, rather less crisply-defined phenomenon.

The coinage ‘Providential Deism’ seems, at first blush, tautological (Deism is necessarily Providential, surely). But CT glosses the phrase as having to do with ‘the notion of the world as designed by God’, an understanding he pegs as ‘perfectly orthodox as a general notion’, but one which ‘goes through an anthropocentric shift in the late 17^th and 18^th century’ [p.221]. Pendant to this are two related changes: ‘a shift towards the primacy of impersonal order’ (emphasis on the ‘impersonal’ I think) and ‘a third facet of Deism’, namely, ‘the idea of a true, original natural religion, which has been obscured by accretions and corruptions, and which must now be laid clear again.’ On this latter I wonder if CT means Paley-esque ‘natural theology’? If so, that’s not the same thing as his Part 1 account of the rise of ‘Nature’ as a concept (the Wordsworthian-Romantic replacement of worldly-extrinsic divine value and beauty with a worldly-intrinsic one, identified the natural world). Or is it a nod to Spinoza’s ‘deus sive natura’? That’s something else again, isn’t it? I mean, assuming it’s more than just semantics.

Anyway, Taylor spends 20 pages or so fleshing out his sense that ‘Providential Deism’ took over from the earlier Catholic conception of God’s ‘plan’ for us.

The plan of God for human beings was reduced to their coming to realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and well-being. Essentially the carrying-out of the order of mutual benefit was what God created us for. The sense that there is a further vocation for human being [sic], beyond human flourishing, atrophies in the climate of “Deism”. [p.242]

That sic is deliberate, I think (I mean, the sic is mine; but I mean, I think CT is talking about human being rather than human beings on purpose). But I’m more struck here by a term new to CT’s argument: ‘benefit’. As as the chapter went on I began to feel that he didn’t really mean ‘Providential’ Deism, but something more like ‘Benevolent Deism’. These two terms are not synonyms, though.

In part my problem is the way the timescale keeps sliding around. I appreciate that CT isn’t writing a traditional historical narrative here, replete with datapoints and citations and so on. Nonetheless it strikes me as a little, well, blurry to critique a perceived ‘bent in European culture towards Reform, in its widest sense’ via ‘Deism’ (a 17^th-C and 18^th-C phenomenon that had, really, almost entirely lost currency by the 19^th)—when your actual discussion reaches back to ‘the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215’ on the one hand, and on the other hops briskly from Abbé Raynal and Voltaire to Bertrand Russell.

In “The Essence of Religion” Russell distinguishes two natures in human beings, one “particular, finite, self-centred; the other universal, infinite, impartial.” The infinite part “shines impartially … in thought it rises above the life of the senses, seeking always what is general and open to all men. In desire and will it aims simply at the good, without regarding the good as mine or yours. In feeling it gives love to all, not only to those who further the purposes of the self. Unlike the finite self, it is impartial; its impartiality leads to truth in thought, justice in action, and universal love in feeling.”

Taylor likes this Russellian immanent beneficence of will, describing it as ‘another way of immanentizing moral power’ via ‘a sense of pure, universal will, an inner power before which we stand in awe, as with Kant’ [p.251]. But this is quite the temporal stretch, isn’t it, from 17^th-C Deism? ‘When we hear Bertrand Russell articulating his sense of moral inspiration in the quote above, he is not just offering an underlying explanation, he is giving expression to the experience of being lifted to a higher, more universal moral plane’ says Taylor [p.252]. Higher I can see, and more universal, but moral? That’s rarely how ‘will’ was theorised in the 19^th-C, or since, surely. I see from the index that Taylor gets to Schopenhauer in bits of Part 3, but there’s no sniff of him here, or of the idea that this immanentizing of will might be a ghastly, ego-collapsing, total-perspective-vortex kind of move. It’s not really a question of whether we agree with Russell’s rosy vision, I think (though as it goes I don’t think I do; my gut-sense of this potential was pre-soured by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as a teen, maybe). Rather, it’s whether Taylor is tacitly moving from ‘Providential’ to ‘Benefactorial’ and so scuffing the specificity of the age he himself has identified as the hinge-epoch. ‘We might look at Russell’s idea of universal benevolence through disengagement in the light of other similar transformations in the history of human spirituality,’ CT says, and goes on:

The call to go beyond our narrower circles of solidarity, to embrace a wider range of people, even all of humanity, in the scope of our beneficent action. Examples as, for instance, the New Testament, the call by Mohammad to go beyond tribe and nation in founding the new Umma, Stoicism, the Buddha’s stepping beyond caste and other ritual distinctions. [p.255]

‘Stoicism.’ Hmm. I have to say this doesn’t sound like the Stoicism of that old politico and soldier Cato the Younger, intensely attached to the Roman Republic as he was; nor like Seneca’s patrician, again intensely Roman Stoicism. Nor (though this is more by way of nitpicking) does it strike me as fair to take Islam and NT Christianity as ‘universalist’ in the way Russell was talking about in the previous quotation. True they accept all, but—as per John 3:18—only those who convert are saved, which is a pretty significant piece of small-print. Still: I don’t mean to get into the weeds: my point is to ponder the larger argument of this chapter, viz.:

There is a specific drive to beneficence in modern humanity moral psychology, independent of pre-existing ties. Its scope is in principle universal. This is the historical trace, as it were, of agape. Or otherwise put, this is the upshot of the second immanentizing move I mentioned above, which no longer seeks the power to build the order in our individual and collective lives in God and grace. But we can’t just describe this move negatively. It not only shuts out God, it attributes this great power of benevolence or altruism to humans. [p.247]

It would be a hobgoblin-of-little-minds kind of nitpickery to object that in Part 1 Taylor traces this same move in quite different terms, to do with a ruthless criterion of social efficiency (‘beggars are as rotten legs and arms that drop the body; there is no place for them in the well-ordered commonwealth’ is the line he quotes on p.109). I mean, that ruthlessness is at the heart of Capitalism and neoliberalism, rather more formative of modern existence than benevolence surely.[1] But for now I suppose I’d suggest, tentatively, that this Brothers Cheeryble narrative of Deism really isn’t ‘Providentialism’.

Of course, this is a partial, waystation report. I can't address Taylor’s whole argument until I've read it all, of course. Maybe Part 3 rebalances this rosy benevolism with the other side of the picture (the chapters are called things like ‘The Malaises of Modernity’ and ‘The Dark Abyss of Time’, so perhaps they do). Balance the Bertrand Russell view of human nature with the Aynrand Russell view of human nature, or at least account for the fact that Ayn Rand's noisome and rudimentary philosophy has more followers nowadays than Bert Rand's much more nuanced and considered one. I daresay I’ll have to come back to this post and retract. We’ll see.

---

[1] I suppose one might object, here, that there are at least two radically incommensurable ideas of ‘beneficence’: a socialist-collectivist no-child-left-behind one, and a capitalist, free-market ‘the best way to address poverty is to maximise wealth-creation in a society that enables anyone who works hard to partake, and which encourages self-reliance’ one.