Disordered Thoughts on "The Malaises of Modernity"

 

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Taylor’s chapter 8 ‘The Malaises of Modernity’—rather rambling and unfocused (my thoughts, I mean), but I don’t have time at the moment to wrench this into better shape. So I’m just jotting a few things down, pretty much at random. In this chapter CT advances his ‘nova’ argument: that secularity is a particular kind of newness coming into the world: that ‘multiple critiques aimed at orthodox religion, Deism and the new humanism’ muscle into social, conceptual and discursive spaces previously exclusively religious: ‘it’s as though the original duality, the positing of a viable humanist alternative, set in train a dynamic, something like a nova effect, spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond’ [299]. That there has come into being what he calls ‘a fractured culture of the nova’.

From here CT goes on to talk about theodicy. He thinks ‘orthodox religion’ (whatever that might be) comes to be regarded as problematic, even untenable, under the logic of Modernity, for four reasons:

One, it offends against reason. Two, it is authoritarian (he glosses this, slightly confusingly: ‘that is, it offends both freedom and reason’). Three, ‘it poses problems of theodicy’ (he adds: ‘or it tries to avoid them; being often pusillanimous in proposing to compensate for the most terrible events in history in a future life, or else bowdlerizing in covering up how terrible these events are.’ I find this little addendum hard to parse).

Fourth, he says, orthodox religion ‘threatens the order of mutual benefit’ in three ways: by ‘mortifying the self’ it ‘inveighs against the body, sensual satisfaction’; by ‘mortifying others’; and it ‘threatens legitimate authority in societies dedicated to furthering the order of mutual benefit.’ I’m not sure about this fourth point: modern secular existence, particularly in the West, is absolutely obsessed and in many cases erotically, bdsm-ishly, invested in mortifying the self precisely as a road to sensual satisfaction: all those folk down the gym, strenuously mortifying their flesh, all those joggers, the epidemic of eating-disorders, that’s very now. So I’m not sure I’m convinced by that point. More broadly, Taylor gets into what he means by ‘threatens the order of mutual benefit’ as he goes on, so I’ll park that for now.

What about theodicy? Taylor seems to think—he presents no evidence for this, and I have to say I doubt it—that when we encounter something dreadful in our life, something like a bereavement, secularism is more useful that faith.

Someone close to you dies. You may want to hang on to the love of God, to the faith that they and you are still with God, that love will conquer death, even though you don’t understand how. What do you say to the challenge of theodicy? One answer could be: that in a sense, God is powerless; that is, he cannot just undo this process without abolishing our condition, and hence our coming to him from out, or through of this bodily condition—although occasionally this spark of our coming to him lights up, and there can be surprising cures.

Or on the other hand, it can be too painful, maddening, full of self-torture to feel that God could have helped but didn’t; or that God somehow couldn’t help, but is supposed to be all-loving father. There is a fight to go on remaining in the love of God. It’s a relief to flip over and to give vent to anger. You can say, I don’t want to pardon God; but in another way, you can say: I see it all as blind nature, and I can let myself go to hate this, or consider it my enemy; I no longer have the burden of having to see it as benign. I can just let fly, take it as my implacable adversary; and there is relief in this.

There is a kind of peace in being on my/our (human) own, in solidarity against the blind universe which wrought this horror. We fall back into this. This possibility has been opened by the modern sense of immanent order.

I can’t say this is an impossible psychological response to grief; indeed in some ways it makes a lot of sense. And I suppose I see that CT is deliberately essaying something counter-intuitive in making this argument. But surely it represents an unusual, an eccentric, mental response to grief; and that the simpler explanation—that one of the reasons religion endures is precisely that it offers consolation for death, both when others die and when we contemplate our own mortality. Taylor then restates this point is an (I think) substantively altered way: ‘the important point is that, once again as with “scientific” proofs of atheism, it is not the cast-iron intellectual reasoning which convinces, but the relief of revolt.’ [306] Hmm. He goes on:

Let us turn to see those directed against the buffered identity within the immanent, impersonal order. They lie along several axes. There is one central axis with which we are all familiar. There is a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost. I put it in the optative mood, because people react very differently to this; some endorse this idea of loss, and seek to define what it is. Others want to downplay it. [307]

He doesn’t invoke the optative mode with his ‘may’, there; he means a simpler conditional mode. But this is me being a pedant.

He goes on to talk about ‘flatness’:

But we can also just feel the lack in the everyday. This can be where it most hurts. This seems to be felt particularly by people of some leisure and culture. For instance, some people sense a terrible flatness in the everyday, and this experience has been identified particularly with commercial, industrial, or consumer society. They feel emptiness of the repeated, accelerating cycle of desire and fulfilment in consumer culture; the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb; the ugliness of slag heaps, or an aging industrial townscape. We may respond negatively to the outsider’s elite stance, the judging of ordinary people’s lives without real knowledge, that these feelings seem to reflect. But however mixed with unacceptable social distance and superiority, these feelings are easy to understand and hard to shake off. And if we think of the immense popularity in our civilization of the flight away from certain townscapes, to the country, the suburb, even to wilderness, we have to admit the virtual universality of some reactions of this range. The irony of the suburb, or garden city, is that it provokes in more fortunate others some of the same feelings, viz., of the emptiness and flatness of an urban environment, which were responsible for its existence in the first place. [309]

Obviously I recognise, indeed for parts of my life have felt, what CT is describing here. I might want to bicker at the edges—slag heaps and New Brutalist architecture may be, and empirically are, celebrated by some today in terms of the sublime (just as the Scottish Highlands or Victorian factories, though deplored by some, were aesthetically rehabilitated by others according to the logic of the Sublime). I’m not sure I see the merit of qualifying this state of mind as ‘felt particularly by people of some leisure and culture’—unless CT means to imply that’s all of us, more or less, nowadays, compared with the more pinched and laborious existences of our ancestors. And I’m really not sure I see that this is, to use Taylor’s own phrase a ‘malaise of immanence’, or a specifically modern thing: isn’t it depression, what used to be melancholy, accidie and so on? That’s not what Taylor is arguing though:

I have distinguished three forms which the malaise of immanence may take: (1) the sense of the fragility of meaning, the search for an over-arching significance; (2) the felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives [ie births, marriages, deaths etc]; and (3) the utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary.

‘Everyone recognizes,’ Taylor says, ‘that these malaises of immanence come onto our horizon, or onto our agenda, with the eclipse of transcendence.’ I’m part of the set called ‘everybody’ and I’m not sure I recognise this—that this ‘flatness’ reflects an ‘eclipse’ of transcendence. All these astronomical metaphors!—novas, eclipses. We might consider, though CT doesn’t, the Dark Side of the Moon—the Pink Floyd album I mean. A generation of young men found a kind of transcendence in listening to that (or to an equivalent musical suite), possibly augmenting its transcendence with the help of mind-altering drugs as they did so. This looks like a trivial point I suppose, but I don’t think it is: popular music went from being something culturally trivial to something globally popular and hugely important through the 1960s to the end of the century, and a series of successive generations found either a kind of sedentary, psychedelic transcendence in it, or more widely they found a somatic bliss-out e-fuelled transcendence-of-the-dance via it. Nietzsche’s Dionysiac antiindividuation. Taylor, I’m guessing, is not a raver. When he comes to the question of what we can do about this ‘flatness’ he proposes two possibilities: ‘the need for meaning can be met by a recovery of transcendence, but we can also try to define the “one thing needful” in purely immanent terms, say, in the project of creating a new world of justice and prosperity.’ The reference to Luke 10 (‘the one thing needful’)

38 Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.

39 And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word.

40 But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.

41 And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:

42 But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

There are, I’d suggest, two ways of reading this famous episode. One is to understand it as part of a larger message Jesus returns to many times through the Gospels: the world is almost over. Give up your ordinary life, your wealth, everything: live like the lilies in the field. Martha says: look, I’m doing all the stuff that needs doing to keep life ticking-over, and Jesus replies: you’re missing the one really crucial thing—that I am the end of all that old quotidian life-work-chores stuff. Cooking and cleaning are rendered irrelevant by my eschatology. Of course, Christians have a problem (C S Lewis thought it the single most vexing problem in the whole Bible) in that the world did not end in the 1st-century AD, so I suppose a different reading comes about here, one that styles Martha as the kind of person whose focus is too narrowly on the material things of the world, and Mary as the person whose attention is in the right place: on Jesus, faith in and love for Him. It seems a little harsh on Martha: somebody has to do all the chores after all. But I suppose we might say: it’s possible, even when working through the chores of the material world, to keep your mind and heart in the right place. This takes me away from Taylor except to note that he has set up his ‘materialist’ option, trying to fill the de-transcendentalised hole in our lives with secular activities, secular good works, as already missing the point of the ‘one thing needful’ reference. Is Taylor’s thumb in the balance?

In a sense, though, we could sum up the malaise of immanence in the words of a famous song by Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?” Perhaps we should even speak of a “Peggy Lee” axis in honour of the singer. But this may not sound serious enough. [311]

The one thing that would improve contemporary philosophy, clearly, is more stiffly delivered Peggy Lee half-jokes. But come at the point CT is making another way: imagine you met God and said to Him “Is that all there is?” What if God is not transcendent. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a genuine encounter with God that would provoke such a question, but that’s just to advance an implicit definition of God as ‘that for which the question “Is that all there is?” is radically inapposite’. That may be—I mean, it makes sense to me as a definition of the divine. But doesn’t it suggest that there’s something circular, tautological even, about what Taylor is advancing here? Our ability to ask “Is that all there is?” indexes a secular existential flatness that is painful and demoralising, and is to be addressed with reference to something of which we cannot ask “Is that all there is?”

My sense, though it's vague and un-worked-through in my head as I type this, is that Taylor is right to identify a hunger for meaningfulness, a desperation (even) for life to be more than just the secular round of waking and working and eating and sleeping, all this buttoning and unbuttoning. And there are transcendentally-blank discourses, and tribal behaviours, that purport to address this: sport, music, sex, I don't know. But I wonder if the bigger constituency here doesn't consist of 'nova'-style offshoots of religion. QAnon and Trumpism, for instance, are both fevered endeavours that address the flatness of modernity, but they do so via modes Taylor doesn't discuss (anger, conspiracy-theorising, a collectivism that pretends to a radical individuality) and they are absolutely compatible with, indeed proceed from, contemporary North American 'God Wins' Christianity.