A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles TaylorEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-20
ISBN: 0674026764
Number of pages: 896
Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Book Reviews of A Secular Age
Book Review: Becoming Children of Modernity
Summary: 5 Stars
Becoming Children of Modernity
A Consideration of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.
--
No one gets out of here alive:
Although trying to write the intellectual biography of modernity is an important, even necessary, task, ultimately, it is impossible. There is something asymptotically elusive about modernity: The depth and comprehensiveness of our definitions increase with abstractness and distance; the accuracy, nuance, and precision of our characterizations increase with narrowness and obscurity. Moreover, the more one studies secular modernity, the more it becomes apparent that it is a phenomenon not easily separable from reality itself; it is nearly as immune to exhaustive intellectual comprehension and description, nearly as impossible to escape or transcend.
This is the main thesis of Charles Taylor's recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I think it is a defensible one. Modernity is, in a very real sense, inescapable. As Taylor puts it--we are in it. In other words, there is something almost ontological about secular modernity. Even though what we are talking about is, of course, an artifact of man, not God, that is, a cultural and historical phenomenon, not a natural or supernatural one equivalent to a change in being itself (I am no Hegelian); nevertheless cultural and historical being is, at least for us, that is, for the culture-dependent rational animals that we are, the ineluctable mediator of any "pure" being that we may experience.
As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued persuasively, pace the Enlightenment's "view from nowhere," we never encounter reality unmediated by tradition, cultural artifacts of human language, conceptual schemes, social practices, ritual and narrative, moral norms, etc.; and though we can ultimately transcend tradition, history and culture to attain timeless truth, it is only through the cultural resources and productions that we both create and are created by, as it were, that we can do so.
Nevertheless, in light of the notorious, anti-Christian and anti-human fruits that appear to have grown solely in the soil of secular modernity, it would seem an obligation for not only Christians but also true humanists to be against it--whatever its ontological status. Should Christians not create adequately anti-modern, domestic, social, cultural, political, educational, and liturgical environments if the ones secular modernity has given threaten their salvation?
However, if secular modernity is more akin to an ubiquitous consciousness or pre-constructive theoretical and practical framework, that is, not a particular ideology or structure-of-sin, but something underlying these, then "anti-modernness" is illusory, and escape futile. Christians are indeed obliged to resist and ultimately "escape" from secular modernity, but that is because Christians are obliged ultimately to transcend all finite times and places when they become idols preventing the attainment of union with the timeless and placeless God--not because modernity is intrinsically evil.
The end of naïveté
What should we say secular modernity is then? Taylor attempts to define it, and it takes him almost eight-hundred pages of historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological, economic, political, scientific, and theological analysis to do it. It is by far the most sophisticated and erudite attempt I have ever read to define what might be, along with God, being, and the individual human person, a most indefinable reality. Out of the many trenchant and profound descriptions of modernity Taylor offers us, this one is especially helpful for our purposes:
"[T]here has been a titanic change in our western civilization. We have changed not just from a condition where most people lived "naïvely" in a construal (part Christian, part related to "spirits" of pagan origin) as simple reality, to one in which almost no one is capable of this, but all see their option as one among many. We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an "engaged" one in which we live as best we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a "disengaged" one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist. . . . The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others. . . .[A] secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of peoples."
Note that his characterization of secular modernity is eminently non-ideological and non-condemnatory; it is neither the rigid denunciation of the traditionalist, nor the insouciant glorification of the humanist. Rather, Taylor identifies secular modernity as something more akin to a radically new paradigm or consciousness shift, in itself neither moral nor immoral, true nor false, good nor evil, pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. It is not to be identified with exclusive humanism, managerial liberalism, and fascist fundamentalism, on the one hand, or the resurgence of public religiosity, the priority of liberal democracy and human rights, and the intolerance of religious intolerance, on the other. For these, according to Taylor, are only its diverse ideological interpretations and embodiments, the structures of thought and practice that have built upon and with secular modernity's peculiar consciousness and potentiality, what he calls the "immanent frame":
"We have undergone a change in our condition, involving both an alteration of the structures we live within, and our way of imaging these structures. This is something we all share, regardless of our differences in outlook. But this cannot be captured in terms of a decline and marginalization of religion. What we share is what I have been calling "the immanent frame"
Although we can think about, and thus gain some distance from, this background and structure in an abstract, philosophical manner, we cannot entirely escape and transcend it.
Summary of A Secular Age
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.
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