When you come of age reading Meaningness, you really hope your children don’t have to start from scratch in figuring out how to relate to meaning, lest they become nihilistic, depressive zombies or get sucked in by murderous or epistemically trashy cults.
Wouldn’t it be great if they could spend a ton of time around other people who had figured out how to sensibly relate to meaning, maybe get some guidance about how to do it, practice under the tutelage of those experienced people, share their meaning-making practices with their family members and friends etc?
[Religion. You’ve just described a religion.]
Ok, it seems I want to raise my kids in a religion. What are the options available?
[Investigates what it would be like to raise their kids in a religion and what religions are running today. Googles a recently successful one, Mormonism.]
Oh no, no. Oh dear. This isn’t going to work.
All of these ‘religions’ we’re looking at are kind of whack? In the sense that when you look at what the main texts are saying, and what the leaders are saying, and you compare that against *waves hands and looks around* the general wisdom, the things the religions are saying just don’t seem that good?
They seem wrong, first of all, but they spend a lot of time chanting ‘We are right! We are right!’ and I think I can see some of the chanting people sticking their fingers in their ears. Plus they don’t seem to have a lot of effective defenses against people just like, leaving and going and doing other things entirely? Seems like a lot of them are having recruitment problems right now. Not excited about raising my kids in a religion they’re just gonna leave.
I’m also noticing something else. When I look at people who aren’t religious, they sure do seem to have a lot in common with the religious people. They still have moral codes and shame others who don’t do enough diversity or justice; they have places they visit to go be in awe together like science museums and the tops of hills in Marin; they are very fussy about the ways their children learn to treat other people; they sometimes avoid eating animals or non-organic food because of their beliefs. The non-religious people still seem to have something like a religion in terms of steering how they live and how they make meaning out of things.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has a term for this religion-shaped non-religion that modern people have and upon which modern society is based: exclusive humanism.
It has two main tenets:
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The thing that gives everything its meaning, purpose etc. That everything is fundamentally oriented around, is humans: human life and human flourishing.
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Everything else that could be meaningful is only meaningful because of its relationship to human life; there are no big other things like gods or God or spirits that are fundamental sources of meaning or purpose, and there are no goals worth pursuing beyond ‘humans having good lives’.
But (as Taylor also says), exclusive humanism comes with its own problems. Even as it is the shared backbone of our culture that we take for granted, it also tends to make people alienated and depressed. I don’t want my kids to be alienated and depressed. It also doesn’t seem to protect people from joining weird sex cults; in fact, it may even encourage them to.
So it turns out what I want is something like a meta-religion to raise my kids in; a social environment where people are good at navigating the differences between religions and not-religions (and weird sex cults) and the ways they make meaning.
I’m not sure that such a meta-religion exists, but if it did, one of its foundational texts would be A Secular Age.
A Secular Age is a long argument against a common trope about religion
A Secular Age is an 800-page book of historical philosophy by Charles Taylor that asks the question: why is it that your great-great-great-great-grandfather, a peasant farmer in Sweden or Ireland, believed in God, but you, a highly educated contemporary WEIRD person living in the USA, do not?
You may say that this is because your ancestors were superstitious and ignorant, lacking the knowledge available through the practice of science and the development of progress, and you are not.
Charles Taylor would disagree with you.
(Yes, about your own mind).
There’s a standard explanation he spends the whole book arguing against; I’ll summarize it here:
Your ancestors were plagued with dangers and forces beyond their control, coupled with a poor understanding of causality. Because they didn’t understand causality, they tended to come up with explanations for things based on how flashy they were, or how easy they were to remember, or how well they translated into multi-day ecstatic feasts where you could hook up with your cousin without repercussions.
They tended to handwave away (or execute the messengers of) explanations that did not fit the mold, because the dominant theories were themselves so fragile that any possible attack (like, someone Galileo-like figuring out an answer to a practical question that seemed to call into question God’s power or mercy) needed to be suppressed in order to keep the whole dog-and-pony show going.
People were bad at reasoning, and they were bad at figuring things out. As they (through painstaking trial-and-error) got better at reasoning and figuring things out, they needed the bad stories less and less and so simply abandoned them, and the modern-day remains of modern theistic religions are like the ruins of once-great cities positioned in bad locations: abandoned in favour of something all-around better. We have better worldviews now; not perfect ones, certainly, but ones that are on track to get better and better as they aim for and approach perfection.
Charles Taylor calls this a ‘subtraction story’ and thinks that it is either wrong or woefully incomplete (politely; he’s very polite). He says:
‘In the following chapters, I will be making a continuing polemic against what I call “subtraction stories”… Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.’
His thesis is that, rather than being the obvious thing that’s left after God and religion are stripped away, secularity was in fact a serious achievement, one that required a whole bunch of work to develop new sources of meaning, new ways of being (and being together) and new shared imagined social phenomena, what he calls social imaginaries.
A Secular Age winds through a vast historical dialogue to re-enact the development of the worldviews of western culture and answer the question of how we got to the shared worldview we have now.
Taylor’s way of telling the story is as if he is sports-commentating one single debate between two incredibly technical and nerdy philosophers, and his job is keeping track of the points of the game, who is winning, and when the game flips and turns into a new game entirely. This all happens at the level of ‘norms’, ‘memes’, or ‘vibes’, but in this case Taylor’s entire job is to get extremely specific about what each of the norms/memes/vibes are, how they shift, and exactly what they shift to. It has the precision and breadth of a valley girl recounting the moment-by-moment vibe shifts during an awkward scene at a party (if the party were the last thousand years of western civilisation). His narration makes it clear that each of the steps made sense at the time, even if a dozen steps strung together ended up in a place nobody could have predicted (like the death of God).
My hunch is that Taylor thinks the game is in a bit of a rut right now, because we all think the current state of play is something like ‘the end of history’ or ‘naturally the most evolved situation we could have gotten to’ or ‘basically done, with only a few potentially minor tweaks needed’. And so this book is Taylor’s volley, or meta-volley, to try and unstick some of the cruft that has gotten the game stuck and get it moving into some interesting and currently-abandoned places.
His strategy here is to show you how weird and contingent a lot of the current shared Western worldview is, what the motivating drives were behind specific developments, and what limitations it currently has that people from earlier times would find just not even a problem worth considering. (Individuals experiencing nihilism and malaise and alienation is one he brings up a lot).
It takes him until about 500 pages into this tome to finally get to laying out the bits of the western worldview that we don’t notice because we’re too busy taking them for granted; by this time, if you accept his approach, you will have watched how he has laid out the dismantling of multiple beautiful, coherent worldviews (each with some plot-relevant flaw) over many centuries, and so when he comes to your own, it hopefully seems like just one more of these structures to take apart and admire.
[His main epistemic technique is to say over and over again: ‘this is my best version of this part of the story; you are absolutely welcome to nitpick it; in fact, I will spend the next 50 pages nitpicking it for you so you only have the most coherent and plausible story to begin your critique.’ He then proceeds to nitpick his own argument more than any author I’ve ever seen. His style is followable, but certainly not ‘pop philosophy’. He references verifiable facts often, but mostly really basic ones like ‘the Church was powerful’ or ‘most people at this time believed in God’. Don’t go asking Taylor to defend his arguments with statistics; that’s just not his style.]
So what does Taylor actually say about how we got to the modern worldview we have, and what it is made up of, anyway?
How we stopped believing in God (i.e. slowly and accidentally)
The book follows a chronological story, the story of ‘how we stopped by-default believing in God’.
Taylor starts by saying roughly ‘I don’t think people believe or don’t believe in God purely based on their own individual reasoning. Maybe a few select intellectuals do, but even they are constrained in what they can think or imagine. What actually influences whether a person believes in God, or whether a society is built around a shared belief in God, is whether the surrounding context, the background sense of things (which he calls a construal), makes believing in God plausible, obvious, or undeniable.’
So then the question is, what features of life used to support believing in God, and where did they go? For one, it used to be that everyone knew the world was enchanted, and experienced it as enchanted.
“I have been drawing a portrait of the world we have lost, one in which spiritual forces impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular time in higher times, a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos. All this has been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation we often roughly call disenchantment.” (Ch. 1, §6)
Taylor roughly says: the world got disenchanted sort of by accident, through a series of well-intentioned Christian reform projects aimed at bringing everyone up to a higher standard of devotion, morality, discipline and faith.
How these went:
It used to be that some people (monks and priests) were religious as their profession, and most people were religious just like, enough to participate in social life. This meant that some things and places were sacred, more sacred than others, and it appeared to medieval reformers that some of the regular people were using this as a ‘get off scot-free’ card to actually not be that virtuous or try to be particularly good at being Christians. It was also a thing that, because churches had a lot of good magic (and everyone believed in magic), people would use church rituals to do magic, like trying to bring people back from the dead and stuff, which seemed to the reformers to be kind of scandalous and improper.
The reformers were like ‘hey, this two-tiered system is actually making a bunch of people less religious and also degenerates; we’re leaving too much religiosity on the table!’ and so they went about a project of getting everybody to be Really Devout. Part of this project was being like ‘the church isn’t so special as a sacred place; you can worship God anywhere! God is in the fields, in your home, in the smallest speck of dirt!’. (People did agree that before, but in practice it wasn’t really emphasised.)
And so you were supposed to experience God everywhere, and not only at church or while kissing special statues or on a pilgrimage to see holy trinkets (a bunch of Reformers were like ‘those are literally idols; idols are literally banned in the first commandment’). I guess people were being a bit too Indiana-Jones about holy objects and it seemed sort of crass.
But then a bit after that, in the 17th century, scientists started developing theories of how everything worked (plants, animals, the human body, the natural world) that had a strongly mechanistic vibe. If everyone now compares minds to e.g. artificial intelligences, then everybody back then was comparing how stuff worked to clocks. It was like they could find a clockwork explanation for everything.
These two ideas combined in an unfortunate way (for God, at least). If you weren’t meant to concentrate in specific places to feel God (like churches and holy sites) but also all the ordinary stuff like plants and animals had mechanistic explanations for how it worked, then how were you meant to feel God in them?
The answer was a bit of a hedge that ended up being (in Taylor’s view) one of the major stepping stones to ‘actually we don’t believe in God at all’. The answer was ‘well, instead of feeling God’s presence in all his creation, we will simply know he is there by seeing what he has made; we see him as more like an architect than like an awake aliveness that permeates all things.’
This change happened, according to Taylor, over a few hundred years, and was roughly completed in the eighteenth century. I once got a bit of a glimpse of what the emotional impact might have been for individuals when I read some journals of a friend after she had left an isolated fundamentalist Christian cult and felt her faith fall apart.
She felt as if she had been abandoned by a lover who was always there; that he had left her and stopped speaking to her through everything she experienced. It seems like basically everyone went through this; elites first (if you look for it, there is art and poetry made to mourn the loss of this felt presence), and everyone else a century or so later. At this point, everyone knew that God was there, but you had to know in a more rational way, not by just looking at stuff and noticing him.
Another one of the major accidental-disenchantment processes was the shift from what Taylor calls the porous self to the buffered self. He identifies the buffered self as a thing that only got developed recently and as a momentous achievement, and the porous self as the thing that most humans in societies have had throughout history.
The porous self is what we might describe today somewhat as someone with borderline personality disorder: someone for whom if things happen, the person is automatically impacted whether they like it or not. They do not have discipline or boundaries or some other way of defending themselves from phenomena that might hurt their psyche; everything that can flow in does flow in. The buffered self is the opposite; it has boundaries and only gets affected if the person wishes it.
Taylor says the buffered self developed in many ways, but the main ways it developed were in response to the fact that having lots of unruly people close together is (from a management perspective) a pain in the ass.
There was a whole project in the 16th and 17th centuries to get nobles to act less like assholes to each other and act out something called ‘civility’; this was a new innovation at the time and would set the foundation for what we call ‘civil society’. ‘Be nice to each other even if you don’t feel like it’ and ‘don’t spit at the table’, it turns out, aren’t norms humanity automatically ends up with; they were spearheaded by a bunch of guys annoyed at the would-be elites and trying to make their behaviour easier to manage.
This general pattern spread with the rise of various practices of disciplining big groups of people (military discipline, discipline in workhouses for poor people, in schools). As all these formal institutions developed, they demanded a kind of self-control that people (particularly the masses) previously didn’t need.
The demanding nature of self-discipline eventually got picked up as a Christian virtue; and various related forms (industriousness, obedience etc) got associated with various forms of (particularly Protestant) devoutness that were trying to rely less on the spooky magical objects and hierarchical rituals of old-school Catholicism. You could get closer to God by being really self-disciplined; by ‘conforming yourself to his will’. And that project lasts today in countless places where we train ourselves and each other to behave in appropriate ways, exercise self-restraint, and treat people politely. The fact that people can ride together peacefully crammed together like sardines on the subway is a triumph of the buffered self.
But as Taylor puts it, people’s relationship to God was never necessarily about God specifically; it was about needing a way to find what he calls ‘fullness’; a thing everybody needs and is looking for. You can identify what people think of as fullness by asking them what the most meaningful moments were in their lives, or what brings them closer to truth, reality, beauty or God. It’s sort of like meaningfulness, but it can be less cognitive; an experience of fullness may have no words involved at all.
As relating to God became more and more about relating to him with your intellect as an individual, it became harder for people to really feel that fullness in their connection to God. So, alternatives arose. The whole idea of Nature, of going out into Nature to commune with God, was invented by some people who invented the general idea of the sublime. The idea of finding deep, idiosyncratic meaning and connection to something higher through Art–that was also invented. The idea of going ‘deep into yourself’ and finding a deep meaningful connection with a ‘true self’, perhaps one connected to God, the pattern used by Jung and Freud and therapists in general–that was also invented. There were all of these ways of finding fullness, some connected to God and some not, that were developed over the centuries as the connection to God people used to feel through sacraments and literally their whole lives fell away, and they needed replacements.
In addition, a new way of understanding God emerged, one that Taylor calls ‘providential Deism’.
This is basically: ‘God is the benevolent (if distant) architect of an ordered world, rather than a master of miracles and spirits. He has plans and purposes, all of which point towards human flourishing. All you gotta do to be a good Christian is to do the things that contribute to human flourishing; you don’t need to do specific worship practices or whatever.’ The United States was founded on this; many of the Founding Fathers were providential Deists. This view was like if you unintentionally refactored the code of the worldview to make it easy to drop the ‘God’ function later on. Which is what eventually happened.
Taylor notes that versions of atheism that we would recognise as like our modern atheism didn’t really develop until this last step was finalised. You could now find meaningful fullness in nature, art, and your connection to yourself, and you could live a good life by being a good person who participated in an orderly society. All of these pieces had to be actively developed, and the ways of imagining them had to be spread, before atheism (a form of exclusive humanism with no God in it) had a decent chance of becoming a thing.
What A Secular Age says about us
Taylor sees exclusive humanism as a real achievement. He sees the modern self as an achievement; the ways we can control ourselves, seek depth within ourselves, open and close ourselves at will: all of that was not possible for our long-ago ancestors. He sees the achievements of our societies built on these things as awesome: human rights, civil rights, equality and justice. We are meaningfully better at these than our rabble-rousing, spit-at-the-table, brawling ancestors of the middle of the millennium. The subtraction story takes all of this for granted, but he points out that it required hard work and creativity on the part of those who developed alternative ways of relating to fullness and alternative social imaginaries.
Taylor’s most useful, gentle project in this book, then, is to point out ways in which the secular modern world we live in (achievement as it is!) has things about it that suck for the people who participate in it, and also limits the capacity of the society as a whole to accomplish things it sets out to.
One such thing that sucks I mentioned earlier: the malaise, lack of meaningfulness, constant risk of nihilism, constant asking of ‘what is all this for’ that hides around every corner in modern life. You may not feel it constantly or at this moment, but it is common enough that everyone knows what I’m talking about (and American Beauty, Fight Club, Infinite Jest, The Matrix and lots of other recent art also do).
Another is the demandingness. There’s a whole moral frame (that Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order). Each individual must strive for their own individual benefit (alone) while also respecting the human rights of others (quite abstract values, but that often demand costly e.g. political sacrifices), holding a kind of general benevolence towards all which is derived through reason and which is enacted through reason (which rhymes an awful lot with Effective Altruism, although he doesn’t mention it by name and it was a fledgling movement when the book was published). This frame can feel cold; it demands self-sufficiency but also love for others, which is developed in a relationship quite distant from them, even through just imagining that others exist. And the societies that are built around it (such as this place called the United States built on a constitution that aims at creating a civil society founded on equal rights for all) can falter when not all their participants can actually walk the walk that being a participant in the modern moral order requires.
And one final thing that I’ll mention is the somewhat depressing picture that nothing can transform your life except the normal ordinary stuff in it. Maybe you could go on SSRIs or find a new partner or go travel and find yourself, true, but those options lack the awesomeness and power of (in earlier times) a life transformed by contact with God. You cannot encounter an angel and fall to your knees weeping and trembling, and thus go on with your life made fully anew. All your sources of deep transformation must be like, reasonable.
I think Taylor’s secret agenda with this epic centuries-long narrative saga of speculative western psychohistory is to find openings towards better alternatives to these problems in the modern worldview, without trying to crash the whole (quite beautifully constructed) edifice down. Per Leonard Cohen:
‘There is a crack, a crack, in everything |
That’s how the light gets in’
And so one of the most interesting parts, to me, of A Secular Age is when Charles Taylor gets into a discussion of immanent versus transcendent metaphysics, or, in plain language, whether you think meaning, purpose, everything is about some big majestic thing that transcends all the boring everyday stuff, or whether you think it is about mostly or entirely the boring everyday stuff.
Modern secular humanism has almost entirely landed on the side of the latter (immanence). Even people who consider themselves religious today (i.e. people who go to church on Sundays and pray to God regularly) would still act, in their everyday lives, as if the everyday, practical stuff is what’s really relevant and important, rather than as if it doesn’t matter and God (the big transcendent guy) is the only thing that does. Taylor doesn’t try to push this or tip the scales in this particular battle; from his perspective, immanence has clearly and decisively won, at least in our era.
What he pushes back against is the idea of exclusive immanence: the claim that the everyday, here and now, practical stuff is all that there is, that nothing transcendent can even in principle exist. This view he describes would be the classic view of a textbook scientific materialist like Daniel Dennett or the behaviourist psychologist B. F. Skinner. This view, or people who hold it, are basically saying ‘not only is the everyday boring stuff the only meaningful stuff, it’s the only stuff that exists. We’re confident that nothing outside that, nothing transcendent, exists, so there is definitely no point in trying to find it.’
Charles Taylor’s take is basically ‘this is a really strong claim! I don’t think it’s very good! I think there’s a nearby claim you could make (probably the immanent stuff is important and meaningful but like, hey, I dunno man, there might be other stuff) that is way more defensible! More people should go with that one. They should be open to the possibility of other stuff. Let’s call that: open immanence.’
And with that rather modest suggestion, he leaves an opening for, perhaps, a whole host of religious innovation to happen. For those of us who like dabbling with founding new religions or shaping the social sphere or whatever, this book is a map of how to make a flourishing social world that AFAICT gets the closest to the ‘here-be-dragons’ portion of any book that exists.
Charles Taylor, the guy himself, as a pointer to alternate ways of encountering fullness
Charles Taylor is a practicing Catholic, and has been his whole life. This makes reading A Secular Age fascinating and sort of like a detective story because it makes you hunt for clues as to why this man with this formidable intellect believes in God. And yes, he does plenty of awe-inspiring intellectual calisthenic feats that flip the frame within which you see the question of belief in God versus non-belief in God in a totally new light that can start to illuminate how a rigorously thinking person might be so religious, but he never quite lays his cards on the table outright.
He is Catholic, and also by all accounts quite successful and happy; two long marriages (the first produced five daughters and ended only with the death of his wife), an incredibly successful run as a tenured professor of philosophy, oh and his sister was the Chancellor of McGill University and lived until 90, he himself is still kicking at age 94, etc. So in some ways this book feels a bit like the report of an anthropologist on a foreign culture: the secular materialist culture he grew up around and lives in but has never been fully a part of.
The fact of Taylor’s existence, as a smart, rigorous contemporary philosopher well-respected by all the other philosophers AND many non-philosophers (an achievement!) who is a practicing and believing Christian, offers some fodder for my initial project that had me reading A Secular Age in the first place: in what socio-cultural or religious context might I raise my children?
It somehow makes Christianity a bit more compelling; if this guy can reason so well and articulate the arguments of atheists and scientific materialists so well and benefit from everything those cultures have built and also dwell in some infinite source of divine meaning, and share that with those he loves… that sounds like an awfully attractive proposition. It doesn’t quite make sense; Taylor doesn’t quite lay out his own ‘belief in God’ bit, only that he thinks that the epistemics with which people define their own belief or lack-of-belief in God these days are limited and basically wrong; that belief in God is not quite propositional in the same sense that ‘I believe it will rain on Tuesday’ is.
To trace his argument I had to crack open his more recent book refuting Cartesian epistemology, co-written with Hubert Dreyfus and called Retrieving Realism, which is even more of a slog and a niche philosopher-only page-turner than A Secular Age (he spends many pages arguing with one specific other contemporary philosopher called Rorty). I’m still mid-way down that rabbit-hole, and who knows if it ever ends. And there’s probably more in his even more recent book, Cosmic Connections, which has something to do with experiences of meaningfulness and fullness as accessed through poetry rather than church or explicit liturgy or doctrine. This guy is pumping out massive works on meaning and religion with the tempo of someone in his twenties.
What made me start (and then finish!) A Secular Age was likely actually something Taylor diagnoses as a totally typical problem for a person in our age; the restlessness he calls feeling ‘cross-pressured’. It’s the sense that whatever frame or worldview or process of meaning-making you have, the existence of competing or even contradictory frames on meaning, transcendence, faith or lack of faith etc calls into question whatever your own stance is; the strategy of sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting ‘We are right! We are definitely right!’ seems more and more absurd regardless of whether it’s about sticking obsessively to the Nicene Creed or adhering to all the tenets of contemporary scientific materialism. And whatever view you settle on as ‘right’, you can throw a stone out the window and hit some other perfectly reasonable person who has built their entire life around tenets that totally contradict yours. This cross-pressuredness is, what he claims, what draws people to meditation and therapists and psychedelics and tiny weird cults and California in general (ok I’m claiming that, Taylor didn’t specifically) and to big fat philosophy books that aim to tell the entire history of how we got to where we are at all.
In my anxiety about how coherent a worldview my children will grow up with, in my worry that perhaps they’ll be too alienated or fall into some sort of dogma or go and totally DIY the worldview thing isolated and estranged from their families…I’m actually in the same boat as basically everybody these days, and we may not have a coherent meta-religion that you can actually meta-join and meta-practice yet, but there is one big confusing boat that contains this fractured mess of worldviews, and to the extent that we all inherited the same psychohistorical soup, we are in fact all in this together. I’ve been recommending A Secular Age to all of my friends, in hopes it will help us look around and see the boat together.