"For Ye Have The Porous Always With You ..."

 

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 more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves. We have changed.”

Taylor is riffing, here, on a venerable distinction, made by Weber and many others: that humans used to live in an ‘enchanted’ world, but that now, to one degree or another, we live in a world that has been disenchanted. 

For Taylor to live on the enchanted world is to apprehend the things around you as ‘charged’: ‘in the enchanted world, charged things have a causal power, which matches their incorporated meaning … [they] can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes.’ [Secular Age, 35]. This imposition can happen, says Taylor, because our boundary, the one that separates us from the rest of the universe, used to be ‘porous’. ‘This porousness,’ he suggests, ‘is most clearly in evidence in the fear of possession. Demons can take us over. Five centuries ago, many of the more spectacular manifestations of mental illness, what we would class as psychotic behaviour, were laid at the door of possession.’

Here’s another bit of Alan’s article:

As Taylor makes clear, the shift from a porous to a buffered self involves a complex series of exchanges. But to put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

Alan’s aim, in his article, is to explore whether our present-day cultural investment in Fantasy as a mode, all the myriad post-Tolkienian stories and mythoi filling contemporary cultural discourse, can be best understood in terms of a desire to return, in a relatively safe way, or at least in a way weighted more towards the divine than the demonic, to an earlier ‘porous’ sensibility. The Lord of the Rings and its imitators, in others words, evidence not a nostalgia for the fixtures and fittings of pre-Modernity, and not (really) for the values or ethos of pre-Modernity, so much as they represent a yearning to unbuffer our sensibilities.

One might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

I find this idea immensely suggestive and productive, both as a way of understanding the large appeal Fantasy clearly exerts nowadays, and as a way of thinking through some of the implications of Taylor’s original distinction.

Still: however persuasive I find this idea—indeed, precisely because I do find it so persuasive—it is important to challenge it. Not Alan’s thesis about modern Fantasy, I mean: but the Taylorian premise underpinning that. The best way of doing so, I suppose, is to ask the most fundamental question: is it true? Is Taylor right that we have moved from a porous to a buffered state?

There are two aspects to Taylor’s case, I think: one is that the way people experience and think-about the world has, in itself, changed. Let’s call this ‘Hypothesis [A]’. There’s no reason for the square brackets, there, except that I like the look of them. The other is that people now are using different (secular, scientific) language to describe to themselves a group of qualia and experiences that pre-Modern people also had, the difference being that the pre-Modern wo/man explained those things to themselves in a religious, ‘enchanted’ way. Call this ‘Hypothesis [B]’.

These two things are not the same. The problem with [A] is that its inaccessible to interrogation, absent not only a time-machine but the ability telepathically to peer inside people’s sensoria. [B] is less purely speculative, perhaps, although it also floats like a hovercraft on a bed of insubstantial, un-instantable priors.

Let’s go back to Alan’s reference to the pre-Modern person’s sense of constant psychic endangerment,  that s/he was liable to being ‘invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed’, and his reference to Keith Thomas’s (I agree) magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) with its itemisation of ‘the panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible.’ His conclusion: ‘it is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.’

But is this what we find? According to the 2013 US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2.5% of the population suffers from OCD so severely it impacts their quality of life, or requires intervention, hospitalisation and medication. That must be the tip of a much larger iceberg, of people who have variations of much milder OCD that they integrate into their lives without needing psychiatric help: all those people with little personal routines and habits and tics, flicking light-switches a certain number of times when they leave a room, following certain rituals when abluting and so on. I myself have a few quirks along these lines. For instance: if I drink a glass of water down in one go I must do so in seven sips (you’ve no idea how mercilessly my wife mocks me for this). If I don’t drink the whole thing, or if I do but not in one go, the rule doesn’t obtain. It’s only if, for example, thirsty after cycling to work I get myself a glass of water and down it there and then. In such a case I must do so in seven sips. I don’t know where this came from, or why it works; I only know that if I don’t do it I feel unhappy and uncomfortable to a large degree, and certainly more unhappy and uncomfortable than is worth the rationalist point-of-principle of me forcing myself to drink the cup in six, or eight sips. Perhaps this is over-sharing, but I’d wager most people have mild versions of this same thing.[1] 

Let me submit, in evidence, my friend Barry, whom I have known for decades. Barry is a Professor in Media Arts and he and I share a fondness for football. When England play, Barry and I used to meet in a TV-equipped pub to watch, in Richmond where he lives, or in Berkshire where I do. We’d catch up, watch the footie, have a drink. Fun! But, after a while, it started to seem to me that when Baz and I met up England tended to lose. On those occasions we couldn’t co-ordinate a get together, and I watched alone at home with a tin of Tesco lager in my hand, the Three Lions tended to … win. Now, by any rational metric (and I am a rational man; so are we both, both rational men, come to speak in football’s funeral etc etc)—by any rational, secular metric whether the match is watched, remotely via telly, by two middle-aged men separated by a couple of inches, or a couple dozen miles, makes no conceivable difference to the result. Of course not. And yet, when England played in the 2018 World Cup, coming within a whisker of making the final, I found reasons not to watch any of the matches with my friend. Sorry, Baz.

That doubtless strikes you as a trivial example. Sure, people nowadays have various superstitions, odd little rituals, rabbits-foots, lucky charms and so on. But we don't really believe it affects the world around us, right? Not on a rational level at any rate. Still: isn't that exactly the point? The last time I went to see Saints FC play I draped myself in the colours of my team. Arriving early, my friend and I browsed the club shop for a bit, examining the merchandise: totems, fetishes, scarfs, amulets, rites, potions (a lot of beer gets drunk in football grounds), chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible defeat of their team, as Keith Thomas might have said.

Now you might object that watching your team lose, though mournful, or perhaps annoying, does not make a person feel as though they have been invaded by demons or spirits. I’d have to agree, although I might also note that saying so falls, a little, foul of Problematic [A] I mentioned earlier.

We might, in other words, at least consider another possibility: namely that, instead of moving from a porous to a buffered state, humankind has undertaken precisely the opposite journey. Or that (and this is perhaps more likely) the journey has been a complicated double-helix twoway from porous to buffered in some respects and exactly the opposite in other.

Does this seem far-fetched? Think again of Thomas’s ‘panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible.’ It’s undeniable that human beings have navigated the debateable land between solid materiality and the spirit realm via fetishes, totems and rituals for hundreds of thousands of years. Has our absolute psychic reliance on such objects really waned under the iron logic of Secularity? I’d suggest not. There are more such items in modern society for the very obvious reason that we are much more materially productive—we manufacture vastly more stuff, and such stuff is very much cheaper than it used to be in terms of individual purchasing power—than was the case in pre-Modern times. A medieval individual might own a totem or two (an amulet, perhaps; or a necklaced cross) though they couldn't afford to own many, and only kings and archbishops could afford to buy, as it might be, the fingerbone of a saint, or a fragment of the true cross. Nowadays we surround ourselves with objects—we live in an absolute blizzard of them. To say we do so because it is in the interests of Capitalism to encourage us to buy things only gets us so far: Capitalism, we could argue, is monetizing a need in us—a need to surround ourselves with fetishes, totems, amulets and potions.

I’m thinking here not just of the fact that many people wear (as it might be) a cross or a star of David on a gold necklace. I talking about the large collection of mementos most people assemble—family photographs, our new penates, arranged on the altars of our shelves and dressers. I'm talking about the extraordinary gadgetification of modern society. An iPhone has a practical function, but it also possesses totemic, symbolic power over us. I’d be surprised if anybody watching how people use phones nowadays could disagree with this. One Sunday evening a few years back my daughter dropped and broke her phone. Her panic that we wouldn’t be able to fix it, or replace it, immediately was surely a manifestation of psychic porosity, anxiety levels hugely disproportionate to the (mild and temporary) practical inconvenience of having to go into school the next day phoneless. She had cathected, as a Freudian might say, prodigies of personal energy into that object. It was more than just a phone; it was her friendships, her anchor in an oceanic world, her safety blanket, the thread running through her Theseusian maze. I’d suggest we all invest in our gadgets, if perhaps to less extreme degrees. Indeed, I’d suggest the phone, as a fetish through which we access the maelstrom of social media, renders us very porous, actually. It was not a rational, buffered, secular collective agent who, as homo politicus, elected Donald Trump or voted for Brexit; it was, rather, a collective entity spooked by intangibles pegged to ‘foreigners’ and ‘dilution of traditional identity’ and the like, a figure that consulted the digital entrails of this magic totem and cast its ballot.

‘In the enchanted worlds,’ says Taylor, ‘charged things can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes’ (p.35). Charged is only too apt for modern electrical totems, though: for phones are literally as well as symbolically charged items. And sometimes, reading A Secular Age, I wonder if I’m seeing the same world that Taylor sees.

See the contrast. A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightaway he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling which is ipso facto declared not justified (p37)

Straightaway he feels relieved? Rarely, surely, is this the reaction of anybody to a psychiatric or medical diagnosis. Taylor goes on:

This step of disengagement depends on our modern mind/body distinction, and the relegation of the physical to being “just” a contingent cause of the psychic. But a pre-modern may not be helped by learning that his mood comes from black bile. Because this doesn’t permit a distancing. Black bile is melancholy. Now he just knows he’s in the grip of the real thing.

This, it seems to me, falls into the realm of problematic [A] I mentioned earlier. But that’s not my main point here. It is, rather, that if we had actually moved from porosity to bufferedness in terms of medical and psychiatric discourses, then placebos would not work. And placebos do work. The placebo effect is potent, although only in those diseases in which patients possess sufficient awareness of the larger ‘social imaginary’ of medicine as such (placebos are ineffectual in Alzheimer’s disease, for instance). We patients do not understand medicine; but we have faith in it. Placebos administered by physicians in white coats work more effectively than those given by doctors wearing civvies; certain shapes of placebo pill work better than others and so on. Indeed, some studies suggest that, although modern anti-depressive medication does indeed contain active chemicals, 80% or more of the improvement such medicines entail are actually results of the placebo effect.[2]

My point is not that ‘the placebo effect’ is mysterious in the sense that ‘science’ doesn’t really understand it (though that’s true). It is that this effect is mysterious in a deeper sense of the word, that it speaks to a central aspect of modern healthcare that depends upon an ongoing porosity, a blurring of medicated subject into medicine as social imaginary that, it seems to me, rather contradicts Taylor’s slightly breezy insistence that a secular medical diagnosis instantly reassures.

I’m not making only a medical point, here. It’s larger than that. People at a party drinking what they assume to be alcoholic beer get ‘drunk’, lose inhibitions etc, even if they are actually drinking alcohol-free beer. People to a large extent remember what they are conditioned by family, friends and society at large to remember: our memories do not sit buffered away inside us, but are porously open to all manner of exteriors prompts and steers.

Conversely, might it be that some—perhaps many—pre-Modern folk were pretty well buffered, actually. That they lived lives largely unbothered by ghosts, ghouls and things going bump in the night, where we step tremulously out of our front-doors garlanded with symbolic prophylaxis against viruses and 5G signals, radioactivity and allergens, alienation and anomie, ‘toxicity’ of interaction (racisms, sexisms, identity-phobias of many stripes) and other things. If Pinker’s Better Angels book is right—and for all Pinker’s dodginess of reputation, I think he’s on to something important in that book—then it stands, surely, as counter-evidence to Taylor’s thesis of a shift from porous to buffered. Because pre-Modern men were enormously more violent to one another than we moderns are; we (perhaps through several centuries of work done by wider and wider travel and interactional diversity, plus the emotional labour of ‘the novel’ in developing our empathetic sensibilities) are rendered porous by our empathy in a way that earlier humans weren’t. To inflict violence on another person is a shattering, infiltrating horror; only sociopaths and those thoroughly conditioned, or ‘buffered’, by eg military training can do it and remain blithe. And yet earlier humans did precisely this, much more often and on a much larger scale. Conceivably they were more buffered, or more  easily bufferable, because they were pre-Modern—more likely to disregard the humanity of the Saracens they slaughtered on crusade because they had previously never travelled far from their village or met people who didn’t look like them, and so on. Riding through blood to the bridle is pretty empathetically buffered behaviour, I’d say. Modern warmakers have to insert literal buffers into the process of killing other human beings nowadays—not sheathing your sword in your opponent’s chest, but sitting in an office guiding a remote drone via a TV screen, like it’s a video game.

I’ve gone on too long, and will have more to say, so should stop. But I really do wonder how easy it would be to write a kind of opposite-world A Secular Age that argued the difference between pre-Modern and Modern sensibilities was the shift from consciousness buffered (by society, by belief-systems, by parochialism, by illiteracy and poverty) to consciousness rendered porous by … well, everything to do. Or perhaps this comes over as merely perverse of me.

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[1] I have a couple of related aversions. I don’t like having 13 unread emails in my inbox, for instance (I’m aware that triskaidekaphobia is a thing, of course). This rarely bothers me though, since I usually have many more unread emails in my inbox than that, and on the rare occasion the inauspicious 13 crop up I can usually either answer an email quickly and bring the number down to 12, or else mark a read email as unread and so raise the number in the inbox to 14. But such irrational (I know very well that these behaviours are irrational—and, more, that they are ridiculous, even contemptible) behavioural loops are relatively rare for me. The seven-sips thing, excepted. That's a real puzzle.

[2] The study in question is a meta-analysis of other studies: Kirsch, Deacon, Huedo-Medina, Scoboria, Moore and Johnson, ‘Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration’ PLOS Medicine 5:2 (2008): e45. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045 Its conclusions have, it seems, been challenged by other researchers.