The Nova Effect

 

There has been, for reasons (as the phrase goes) outwith my control, a long hiatus on this blog. I might apologise for that—though I don’t know to whom my apology would be addressed, since nobody has been or will be reading this. At any rate, various work and other things having been sorted, cleared out of the way and so on, I return to Taylor’s big book. I have previously read Parts 1 and 2, some 300 pages of small-font, closely reasoned text. Here, with links, are my reactions, so far:

1. "A Secular Age": Introduction

2. Throughlessness

3. Modern Social Imaginaries

4. "For Ye Have The Porous Always With You ..." [on Taylor's 'Porous/Buffered' distinction]

5. On Legitimation [on Taylor’s Part 1 ‘The Work of Reform’]

6. Benevolence and the Jets [on the first part of Part 2: ‘Providential Deism’]

7. Ordered Impersonalities and Funky Gibbons [on the second part of Part 2: ‘The Impersonal Order’]

[There's also this blog on Trilling's "Sincerity and Authenticity" (1972), in which I discuss the overlap between what Taylor is arguing in his long book and what Trilling argued in his short one]

Now I turn to Part 3, entitled ‘The Nova Effect’, the first section whereof is called ‘The Malaises of Modernity’ (pp.299-322). 

CT starts off with a ‘summary overview’: those first three hundred pages, he says, provide ‘an explanation of how there came to be an exclusive humanist alternative to Christian faith’. And before we can reply with our ‘we’ll be the judge of that, Charlie, actually’ he qualifies what he is saying, boiling it down to two things. First, ‘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]. Second, that there has come into being what he calls ‘a fractured culture of the nova’.

I have, I suppose, a couple of issues here, and one main one—the notion that ‘novelty’, in this context, only enters the scene with the Enlightenment. CT’s assumption (as I take it to be) is that a ‘nova’ like this is a kind of virus, in the sense that once one introduces such specifically new novelty it spawns and expands until it has, like Agent Smith in Matrix Revolutions, overwhelmed the whole world. I'm not sure about this. There's also his strange insistence that it is 18thC-and-beyond ‘atheism’ (for want of a better word) that articulates ‘the thinkable and perhaps even beyond’ (isn’t ‘beyond the thinkable’ the very nub and throughline of religion?). But put that on one side. I'm more interested here with the second implication of Taylor’s irruption of ‘humanism’ into religion, which he considers ‘relatively recent’:

The fractured culture of the nova, which was originally that of elites only, [now] becomes generalized to whole societies. This reaches its culmination in the latter half of the twentieth century. And along with this, and integral to it, there arises in Western societies a generalized culture of ‘authenticity’, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own fulfilment, ‘do their own thing’. The ethic of authenticity originates in the Romantic period, but it has utterly penetrated popular culture only in recent decades. [299]

I can see that there’s something in the ‘authenticity’ valence being a distinctly Romantic (capital ‘R’) phenomenon; but the larger point here smacks of a rather offputting elitism: i.e., it used to be that these ‘important matters’ were left to experts—now everybody can have a say. Obviously there’s an aspect of this, the random-nutters-sending-mad-emails-to-professors aspect, that can seem irksome; but surely the bigger point, the notion that religion, philosophy, art and culture are no longer things handed down de haut on bas by the aristoi (like Taylor), but matters accessible to everyone (hoi polloi like thee and me) is a massive positive. No?

But my main issue with Taylor’s argument here is otherwise. His argument is that ‘the move to Deism and then to exclusive humanism’ can be summarised by the phrase: ‘the nova effect’ [300]—that in other words it is newness that characterises the problem (he calls it ‘the predicament’) to which he has dedicated this whole book. I’ve previously on this blog expressed my dissatisfaction with the way Taylor uses ‘Deism’—a term with a particular socio-cultural meaning that Taylor uses very broadly indeed—but that’s less my worry here. It’s this notion that the shift The Secular Age exists as a book to describe and account for can be understood in terms of a newness that comes into the world. Taylor’s chapter 8 restates his ‘porous vs buffered’ distinction, reframing it now as a ‘nova’.’ He talks of a ‘mutual fragilization of all the different views’ as ‘one of the main features of the world of 2000 in contrast to that of 1500’:

Pluralism is certainty an important part of the answer, how things are different today. When everybody believes, questions don’t as easily arise … [and] this effect is now further intensified by what I have been calling the instability of the buffered sensibility. Cross-pressured we are prone to change and every multiple changes over generations. [304]

Taylor complicates this picture by arguing, rather counter-intuitively, that these deracinating, restless nova of change are also characterised by a ‘condition of maximum homogeneity’: it is, indeed, ‘homogeneity and instability work[ing] together’ that ‘bring the fragilizing effect of pluralism to a maximum.’

I suppose we could say that, if we agree with the overarching thesis of Taylor’s book that the world has changed from broadly religious to broadly secular, then a novum—secularity itself—is at play. But it boggles my mind that he is, without excavating any of the specifics, implying that this novum correlates a change from unity to destabilising, homogenous plurality. Setting aside those parts of the world that have never been Christian (that’s a large set-aside, I know …), even Taylor’s own Christianity has always been a social and discursive site of maximum pluralism and instability. Luther’s Protestantism is not the start of something in Christianity, it is one (admittedly major) waystation on a long road of endless pluralistic wrangling and arguing, all advanced under the rubric of spiritual homogeneity. Through its long history ‘Christianity’ has meant Monotheism, Trinitarianism, Adoptionism, Arianism, Anomoeanism, Docetism, Donatism, Circumcellionism, Dualism, Ebionitism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Paulicianism Priscillianism, Naassenes, Sethianism, Valentinianism, Luciferianism, Macedonianism, Marcionism, Modalism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Montanism, Nestorianism, Novatianism, Patripassianism, Pelagianism, Pneumatomachians, Psilanthropism, Sabellianism, Subordinationism, Valentinianism, Catharism, Conciliarism, Hussitism, Lollardism, Antinomianism, Consubstantiationism, Febronianism, Gallicanism, Jansenism, Pantheism, Anabaptism, Arminianism, Quietism, Americanism, Feeneyism, Indifferentism, Communism, Reincarnationism, Communism and Capitalism. That almost all of these are now called ‘heresies’, and most have been extirpated from Christian praxis, is history-written-by-the-winners bias, not a reflection of any actual unity. ‘Secularism’ isn’t one of this list, it’s true (though a couple of these ‘heresies’ come pretty close to it) but that's not a significant omission, I think. Taylor’s argument in this chapter—in the whole of his part III ‘The Nova Effect’—is that a shift from porous to buffered sensibilities is the cause of ‘the breadth of the nova effect’ [305], that this is a new newness. And I don’t think it is. I think a longer and more granular, nuanced comprehension of the larger historical context reveals exactly this blend of homogeneity (‘for are we not all Christians?’) and restless, furious pluralism: wars were fought, people tortured and killed in large numbers, over these things. That list surely represents a more radical and destabilising pluralism than modern varieties of secularism?