Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" - A Review

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007), hereafter noted as SA, with almost 800 pages of written text, is an ambitious undertaking for any intrepid reviewer, or author, but my task here is not only to convey some understanding to a broader audience, but also to contextualize the author and argument – and to offer possible critique where some may be missing. Anyone wanting to read Taylor in the original, without attempting his magnum opus should consider purchasing (at about the same cost, mind you) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard, 2010), hereafter referred to as VSSA, a series of articles edited by Warner, Vanantwerpen and Calhoun. With a titular turning on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, VSSA critiques and expands on dimensions of A Secular Age and concludes with Taylor’s own significantly succinct Afterword “Apologia pro Libro Suo,” a worthwhile summary and the best around, counting at about 21 pages.

While A Secular Age has a strong philosophical and historical bent, it is largely written in colloquial English, but the numerous and widespread intellectual references and ideas could make the work a difficult read for a general audience, plus the book is not as concise as it could be. This loquaciousness puts sometimes him the same league as fellow Canadians John Ralston Saul and Donald Savoie, only Taylor almost always has something stimulating to say, and for this reader, at least, there were many pleasant cranial explosions along the way, all gratefully received.

Taylor outlines his thesis in A Secular Age on page 3: “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even among the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Taylor slowly travels through each century, beginning around 1500, explaining the development of secularism as an historical phase, and this composes the first half of the book, amounting to a fascinating intellectual history of growing European “disenchantment”, a central theme and term borrowed from the German sociologist, Max Weber.

According to Jon Butler in VSSA this section attracted little attention from early reviewers: “A Secular Age glosses so many different and possible explanations for secularity so discursively that it would be nearly impossible to say that Taylor has missed something important, though his reader may have.” [VSSA, 197] Butler goes on to say, and here I agree, “Taylor is at enormous pains to dissect the complicated nature of both belief and unbelief before and after 1500.” [VSSA, 199] Indeed, this very early section of A Secular Age is extremely laboured, even painful, especially when Taylor goes to great lengths to discuss changing conceptions of death [SA 61-84, approximately], but there is clearly no mention of anything like the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Estimates vary, but up to 20 million people, approximately one third of Europe’s population, perished. Given that no one knew why so many were dying en masse, and that even priests were running away from admitting last rites, there is no wonder we see an early weakening of religion. So we see the dangers of philosophy literally glossing over history, but otherwise Taylor (true to his Oxford mentor, Sir Isaiah Berlin) does succeed in the “historicity of our contemporary options, about the sedimentation of the past in the present.” [SA 268]

Taylor’s omission of the Black Death helps explain his use and development of the concept of the “buffered self” as “the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces.” [SA 135] It is a “disengaged, disciplined stance to self and society” which one finds in the development of manners, for example, and it is central to modernity and secularity. [SA 136] In turn it has the reverse effect of allowing for “the greater intensity of intimate relations” within for example the family.[SA 140] “But in general, we relate to the world as more disembodied beings than our ancestors” [SA 141] Briefly speaking, it contributes to the “great disembedding” (to coin a term, perhaps) of us from the “social sacred” – especially by Christianity, for “God so loved the world.” (John 3.16) [SA 157,158] This can be found in our “social imaginaries” which speak of freedom and mutual benefit (Locke, especially), and the rise of "humanism” which can be considered rather typical of Enlightenment thinkers, bordering on paganism (Diderot and Kant, perhaps, and before them Bayle and Spinoza). Christianity is sanitized “but it doesn’t quite know what to do with suffering”; aristocratic heroism wanes, and all (referring to not just a few, but “all”) we may do is wrestle with the tattered remains of a (secular) honour code. In any event Taylor reveals a sense of Romanticism, resonating with Herder’s central notion of “humanity as the orchestra.” [SA 318; VSSA 320]

The second half of A Secular Age is less historical, more analytical. Of particular interest is his treatment of the “Age of Authenticity”: I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. [SA 475] Taylor makes an interesting connection between this expressivism, the rise of “choice” and the growth of consumer culture where “commodities become vehicles of individual expression, even the self-definition of identity.” [SA 483] Not because of the scientific "facts" themselves, but because of autonomous and geometric reason (starting with Hobbes and Descartes) pushed by science, our materialism has united with a moral perspective that results in "exclusive humanism" which is atheistic. [SA 569]

In his Chapter “Religion Today” Taylor writes with delicious irony: “Some great realizations of collective life are lost, but other facets of our predicament in our relation to God come to the fore; for instance what Isaiah meant when he talked of a “hidden God”. In the seventeenth century you had to be Pascal to appreciate that. Now we live it daily.” [SA 531,532] Here we also see that A Secular Age is primarily concerned with (as one reviewer called it) "elite discourse" (when I thought it was philosophy). [VSSA 187] Nonetheless, there are only a few nods to social historians, notably Natalie Zemon Davis, probably the only female writer mentioned in the book, author of The Return of Martin Guerre.

But Taylor is not alone in arguing that secularism belongs to a general period of “modern” history, that we now belong in a post-secular age. The eminent German thinker Habermas, long the exponent of Enlightenment rationalism, has recently given up on “methodological atheism” [VSSA 50]. Taylor also offers sacrificial crumbs for George Bush (the lesser) and his “crusade” in Afghanistan, along with identifying with Obama’s message of “Hope” [VSSA 84]. More importantly, Taylor resembles a modern-day St. Augustine whose own classic City of God was written after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410 - a shock to the Roman Empire and its classical consciousness. It is worth pointing out that Taylor makes explicit references to Augustine and what he calls “the hyper-Augustinian juridical-penal framework,” in other words the Christian notions of original sin and atonement [SA 651]. Broadly speaking A Secular Age can be seen as a cathartic and “spirited” response following the attack on New York’s World Trade Towers on 11 September 2001, or even as an answer to the relative decline of the West. Today Augustine, too, is very much in fashion, especially as the world’s economy shifts toward the engine of China, where (the Jewish thinker) Spinoza’s groundbreaking “atheism” and secularism go well with so-called neo-Confucianism, a topic Taylor ignores or does not anticipate.

Nonetheless Taylor is well prepared. His own doctoral research was on Hegel (fixed as he was on the “world historical” figure of Napoleon) who in turn had strong affiliations with Augustine’s thinking. Both Hegel and Augustine rely on theories of mediation. (See also Religion, Politics and Law (Brill, 2008), 71-96 – or just read City of God). For Augustine, the Church mediates between “the city of man” and “the city of God,” and so knowledge of God brings mediation, as Augustine “Christianizes” Cicero and the classical tradition of the middle and the balanced sense of virtue, or Horace’s “golden mean.” (John Ralston Saul please take note). [cf. VSSA 275]

Moreover, Augustine talks of the value of “the opposition of contraries” and the “antithesis” which feed well into Hegel’s own Trinitarian doctrine of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Augustine begins this Trinitarianism (with Hebraic antecedents) where God is considered the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we find it reproduced throughout history in the West: for example, Montesquieu’s tri-fold division of government as the legislative, executive and judicial in The Spirit of the Laws (1748); the American “life, liberty, and happiness”; the French Revolution’s “liberty, equality, fraternity” (mindful of the constitution of 1789 which was more conservative and liberal than that of 1793); and Canada’s “peace, order and good government.” We also find it in Auguste Comte’s positivism and his “law of three stages,” his spiritual calling on Industrialists, perhaps a French complement to Hegel in the mid-nineteenth century.

Trinitarianism lends itself to ”middle way” thinking – and is at the root of much Western self-reflective, or even self-critical, culture, also expressed by Augustine’s Confessions, a work which in turn was anticipated by Greek classical thinking and Socrates’ dictum: “Know thyself”. In other words, there are reasons for the appearance of democracy first in the Judeo-Christian West, and we can find it expressed in Canada (“a country nourished on self-doubt,” according to Al Purdy) but it is also in Augustine, who made his way into our secular political culture with the Constitution Act of 1867. So while our culture is either secular or post-secular, it could be argued that (Judeo) Christianity’s greatest offspring is democracy, and Taylor himself raises the point when he identifies the “welfare state” as implicitly Christian. The question is, however, as we move away from the welfare state ... whither Christianity? And whither our democracy?

But there is another reason why Taylor refers to Augustine. He asks the profound question in his Confessions: “What, then, is time?” (Book XI, 14) It is actually the French (Protestant) philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in Volume One of his magisterial three-part series Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984), who dissects Augustine’s notions of time. Ricoeur translates Augustine as: “How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?” (Time and Narrative, 7) Ricoeur’s thesis is that Augustine holds to a “threefold present” – the trinity of the past, present and future live in the present. Perhaps I digress, and here it is best to consult Augustine directly in order to gain an understanding of Taylor’s own thinking:

Nevertheless, O Lord, we are aware of periods of time. We compare them one with another and say that some are longer and others shorter, and the result of our calculations tells us that it is twice or three times the length of the one which we take as the unit of measurement, or that two are of equal duration. If we measure them by our own awareness of time, we must do so while it is passing, for no one can measure it when it is past and no longer exists, or when it is future and does not yet exist – that is, unless he is bold enough to claim that what does not exist can be measured. The conclusion is that we can be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing. Once it has passed it no longer is, and therefore cannot be measured. (Confessions XI,16)

Augustine’s conclusion is: ”we can only be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing,” and it is this deep sense of something passing that seems to have moved Taylor to write A Secular Age. In other words, time is not homogenous. It cannot be secularized (despite the best attempts of the French Revolutionaries, who resorted to Terror). At the end of the nineteenth century three figures – Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust (a little later) – all tried to come to terms with the passage of time, its “inner” and “outer” duration (and here I simplify for the sake of brevity). Things are “never still.” Ever since Huysmans “decadent” novel A Rebours [Against Nature] (1884) the general public’s reading of Cicero (who had a significant influence on Augustine) went into steep decline, putting an end to the classical tradition of moderation, paving the way for twentieth-century extremism (and the revenge of Caesars, so-to-speak). By invoking Augustine at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taylor is not only reliving an apparent loss of hegemony, but summoning the rather athletic memory of the Christian tradition, along with it an exceptional conversion experience and its great soul seeking – and the Trinitarian legacy of mediation. The past is no guarantee for the future, but in promoting the memory of Augustine’s thought Taylor offers us some continuity - and perhaps guidance.

"A Fair Country"? Just ask John Ralston Saul: A Review

John Ralston Saul has finally written a thoughtful and interesting book – A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (2008). However, I am not certain he is always telling “truths”, and I have my doubts that Canada is a fair country.

Saul begins with a provocation that sets the tone for the whole book: “We are not a civilization of British or French or European inspiration. We have never been .” Elsewhere he writes, repeating his central theme: “... we are a métis nation ... the underlying currents of this country are more indigenous than imported ...” And towards his conclusion he winds up, rather breathlessly over two jumbled pages:

"... ours is not a civilization that emerged out of the Judeo-Christian line. ... If the central inspiration of our country is Aboriginal, then we are not, and never have been in the European or U.S. sense, a Christian country."

This is postcolonial thinking in full form, and despite his trenchant critique of the Canadian university system, Saul shares this particular vogue, having forgotten that the idea of colonizing a space like Canada probably began with the Crusades. Does he really mean Canada is not (or was not) at all a “Christian” country because “we have never been” English, French or European in inspiration? Apparently he has never been to a shopping mall in December. Or does he mean that Canada’s “Christianity” is just different from that of other Western nations? This appears as an effete compromise to the promise of a striking thesis. Do the Indigenous peoples form a kind of "great code" (if we may put Northrup Frye aside), a native Canadian enchantment that pervades our culture unlike any other?

The Canadian, multicultural ability to imagine the other, according to Saul, comes primarily from our contact with Indiginous peoples, and their understanding of “minimal impairment”, “the ever-enlarging circle” and the “common bowl”, not from our “bipolar” English-French fact. If our “central inspiration” is Aboriginal, this frees us, like the Chinese, from uncomfortable notions of “guilt” and “original sin”. The Aboriginal condition, the métis as proto-multicultural – or, better yet, intercultural - finds common expression in the untainted space of “the Land” where, however, relatively few actually settle, or live, considering the trinity of our metropolitan cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The idea of the North figures highly in Saul’s analysis, and rightly so: the more the Canadian government wants to lay claim to Arctic sovereignty, the more we need to reinvent our sad history with the Aboriginal peoples. As well, the more we attune ourselves to the demands of the changing environment, the more we need to pay heed to Aboriginal culture, overturning Descartes’ classic claim of man as the “masters and possessors of nature.”

But Saul offers a Canadian myth shy of fact. It is a thesis that is only possible in “a secular age” (to borrow from McGill philosopher Charles Taylor), where there is disenchantment, no transcendence and no intrinsic cohesion. Where no common faith prevails, officially-speaking, and where a diverse people are in want of social glue, Saul creates a story of “national” origins, befitting his former vice-regal relationship, making an intuitive leap backwards (to the “state of nature”) and forwards (to civil society), and from the Crown rightly to the first Nations peoples. We were allegedly multicultural before - there exists a métis current – and we appear so today: the link is the act of an intellectual associating ideas, but the focus is too narrow and Voltairean. Oddly, I see shades of that famous anti-clerical cry: “Ecrasez l'infame.” Indigenous practices have substituted for everything else, including religion, as “nation” building prevails over all (something Voltaire would not tolerate), and the “imagined community" is just that: imagined, taking a postmodern leap of faith today, guided by his own spousal example. Is it wise, in this vast and diverse country to dispense summarily with all residual religious notions, as Christian “guilt” has considerable social utility, for what prevents us from habitual jay walking, or worse? Importantly, the Christian notion of “conscience” (and with it the sense of the responsible individual) is linked to the advent of Democracy which arose first from the West, with its successes - and some evident failures (especially with respect to Indigenous populations). Similarly he neglects ancient Judaic notions of “social justice” (to which he owes a debt) and “moral freedom”, again notions that had a powerful influence on the shaping of Western values.

In a political sense the larger problem is that Saul moves us away from the tradition of parliamentary democracy which is in need of proper tending and attention – badly. If we have never been British or French or European in inspiration, then we might have a problem, politically speaking. If “the Indians were our Greeks – our Athenians, our Spartans,” then Saul (the former vice-regal consort) makes it all the more easy in 2008 for prime minister Harper, in an unprecedented move, to ask the current governor general for a prorogation of Parliament with a so-called constitutional “time off”. Parliament can be closed on the fly, representative democracy can be made a mockery of, Western populism can confront Quebec all because parliament has no deep roots in Canada: it is pitched on postcolonial turf. That Adrienne Clarkson has written a forward to Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin’s stimulating collection "Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis" (2009), which deals with the heat and smoke of the late months of 2008, only adds to the irony.

Canada (along with Britain) is increasingly in the hands of a “court government”; we are witnessing “the collapse of accountability” and noted scholar Donald J. Savoie (the author of these apt phrases and a lengthy book published in 2008) suggests that we develop the (higher) civil service as a check on prime ministerial abuses of powers, a notion I find rather wrongheaded (and undemocratic, inclined toward the mandarin classes), too focussed on the history of public administration (for which one finds a corrective in the political science offerings of Russell and Sossin). Saul – long an opponent of rational linearity, bureaucracies and the like, which he makes amply clear in his book - goes very much in the opposite direction and develops the aboriginal culture as “central”, undermining some of the roots of our own – indeed sometimes rather oppressive – Western political traditions.

Saul’s worry is that “we have been irrevocably separated from our foundation” whereas I would suggest in offering only one “foundation” he has lost all texture to Canadian history – and to “the middle way” which he claims is rooted exclusively in our Aboriginal culture. (It might also have something to do with historic religious roots where Christ “mediates” between God and men, if we are to consider St. Augustine). Would not an open-ended and more commonplace “foundation trilogy” – Aboriginal, French and English – serve us better, politically and historically speaking? Britain had its Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings (and Normans) who are in much more favour today after being historically put down by Christianity but that does not mean we (or they) should not nourish the light of Athenian democracy. Dragons, elves and wizards were not just the stuff of J.R. Tolkien (and J.K Rowling): the ‘magic’ of Middle Earth and the Dark Ages is finding a postcolonial revival today, but does that mean we should repress Solon and Pericles? Saul borders on making Canada a non-Western country with his single-minded emphasis on the Aboriginal and on throwing off the colonial yokes – both European and American.

For Saul the aboriginal people are the ultimate “other” which accepted “others”. He explains: “Civilizations are normally judged by that central philosophical tenet - the ability of citizens to imagine the other.” Here he comes across as his own quintessential Canadian, but is ahistorical, and rather out of touch, perhaps because he laments the detours of fact from his thesis, the advent of homelessness and the like. Contrast the above quotation with: “So the natural state of being in an organized society, certainly in the Western, Judeo-Christian, rational tradition, is likely to be one of division and the celebration of disadvantage.” To sum up: Canada represents an intentional “civilization”; Europe (and presumably the U.S.) does not meet the Canadian standard of inclusiveness, yet he is careful to claim that “Canada has no model for the world.” Even more significantly, Saul warns that our Indiginous-induced egalitarianism “is not a natural state of organization” (an important point on which he hardly dwells) but at the same time he trumpets a Canada outside the European tradition.

We are apparently a métis civilization, deeply shaped by the first Nations cultures into which European newcomers (and here we see an expression of postcolonial revisionism – and perhaps some self referencing by Saul) ‘married up’, a dubious claim which considers early white male settlers free from racial taints and sexist bigotry. Not all marital unions, métis or not, can be likened to that of the philosopher Saul and constitutionally privileged Adrienne Clarkson whose intercultural (and – most significantly - childless) relationship, is considered a prime example of “recreating” Canada’s métis foundations. Apparently 4 percent of couples in Canada are mixed race (a dubious statistic), and this is hardly what I would call what Saul refers to as approaching “critical mass”. The apparent fact that some mixed race couples in some professional circles might be approaching 50 percent - another dubious figure - might have something to do with the demographic shifts (immigration) and with it international perspectives, and with the postmodern prevalence of the “hybrid” – more so than with some “unconscious civilization.”

There is much that is “unconscious” in Saul’s work. “Peace, order and good government” was supposed to be “Peace, welfare and good government.” Peacekeeping comes from a First Nations example. Lester Person’s Nobel Peace Prize has its roots in aboriginal culture. The idea the “individualism and group interests must be balanced” – an agreeable notion – somehow comes from an Aboriginal idea, but Saul offers no proof. Even though 40 percent of Canada’s immigrants end up in Toronto, what will matter most in 50 years (according to novelist Joseph Boyden) is “The Land,” an appreciation that is not necessarily exclusive to First Nation’s peoples. The core principle of being Canadian is apparently “fairness” but Saul adds: “How successful we are at embracing that principle is another matter.”

If Canada is considered a fair country, why is it not successful at being fair? Does the self-image of fairness make it a fair country? Do we have a mythology that is really just a myth? Do Indigenous people think Canada has been fair? Do the métis? Could there possibly be other groups – and individuals, new and old in our multicultural matrix–that think Canada is actually fair – or, rather, not fair? Is Canada so fair that it is no longer sociological? Canadians are (or were) internationally known as fair, but are Canadians really fair to others in their own country? We need only travel as far as Vancouver’s Downtown East Side to get a whiff of this “fairness.” The myth of fairness is just that – a myth. It is how Canadians prefer to be identified, for lack of anything else; it is part of our collective imagination, foisted on often underemployed newcomers grateful to have a semblance of democracy (with little sense of history), but it does not necessarily correspond with social fact. Saul deals well with a number of “truths” but his notion of “fairness” brims with misplaced self satisfaction. Overall "A Fair Country" makes for a good read, but the central theme rings too much like an "idée fixe."