Modern Social Imaginaries

 

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 the distinction Taylor makes between ‘porous’ selves and ‘buffered’ selves—I’ll have more to say about this later. The other is addressed in the fourth chapter here: the ‘social imaginary’. 

Now, this, as a concept, looks rather familiar, I'd say: something like Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, or perhaps an Althusser-ish spin on ideology. But Taylor is adamant he’s trying to articulate something else, that ‘what I am trying to get at with this term is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode’ (p.171). So what is it? Well: it is ‘complex’. It ‘incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other’:

the kind or common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go. but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what mis-steps would invalidate the practice. (p.172)

Taylor identifies ‘three important forms of social self-understanding’ as particularly important to his larger argument: ‘(1) the “economy”, (2) the public sphere, and (3) ‘the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule’ (p.176).

I’m not convinced this is that different, actually, from (say) Bordieu’s Habitus, or Althusser’s ideological interpellation. But I may be doing Taylor an injustice. He sees this social imaginary as rooted in what he called the ‘modern moral order’, which he says ‘played a central role in the  development of modern Western society’ (p.159). He derives this from Grotius, via Locke, which made me wonder how his argument might have been different if he’d derived it instead from Richard Hooker’s prior Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—much more than just a work of theology, or Anglican apologetics; and very influential, it establishes, or tries to, a grounded theory of politics, law and social community. Factoring in Hooker would make it harder for Taylor to insist that the new moral order was all Lockean, all ‘Industrious and Rational’ (p.167), which would diminish the force of his larger argument.

At any rate, that’s not the route Taylor wants to go down.

The Gospel generates the idea of a community of saints, inspired by love for God, for each other, and for humankind, whose members were devoid of rivalry, mutual resentment, love of gain, ambition to rule and the like. (p.161)

I think Taylor offers this as a kind of prototype of his moral order (‘something to strive for, realized by some [though] only a minority will really succeed’), but I’m not sure it’s … true, though? He’s talking about the disciples (isn’t he?), whose number included Judas, thrice-denier Peter, doubting Thomas and so on. I mean, one of the most remarkable things about the Gospel is its (novelistic, as Kermode argues) portrayal of a band of enthusiastic but flawed and rough-edged men. Isn’t it?

Once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one. After all, are we not all individuals? Do we not associate in society for our mutual benefit? How else to measure social life? (p.168)

 I don’t think this is right, though—as a description of the water-we-fish-all-swim-in nature of modern social life. It’s half the picture. As against this section's emphasis on the original Enlightenment dream of the French Revolution Taylor needs to set the Herder-ian invention of the Volk, which has had at least as firm, and arguable a firmer, purchase on the self-sense of more people over the last 250-years than has Taylor's Rational Individuals idea. Given that we now find ourselves (in 2020) in the midst of a global uptick in nationalist tribalism and Volk-ish moral ordering, this absence seems rather glaring. The index tells me that Taylor discusses Herder, briefly, in the pp-500s somewhere (there's nothing on Hooker) but I think it’s needful here—it’s what seems to me awkward about this three-part division of the social imaginary into economics, ‘the public sphere’ and democratic process. The first and third of these clearly do rely on a kind of Grotian contract-law rational actors interacting model, and the middle one is also spun by Taylor as a ‘we the people’ US-constitutional sovereignty. But the Volk is not the same thing as a charter-defined political legitimacy based (as Taylor says) on concepts of conscience, virtue and political representation (p.204). I think the organic large-scale tribalism of Volk-ish appeals, with their creative blurring of the political into the aesthetic and even the mystical, has a much more significant place here than Taylor allows.