Showing posts with label secularization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secularization. Show all posts

Sunday, December 03, 2017

The Dilemmas of a Secular Age

I am privileged to teach the first course of the Doctor of Ministry program at the Institute of Lutheran Theology entitled, "The Secular Age."  Our D. Min. wants students to be deeply aware of the intellectual and cultural horizon into which they must proclaim the gospel, an intellectual and cultural horizon that is by no means as simple and unambiguous as the secularists believe.  

The text used in this course is Charles Taylor's 2007 book,  A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).  In this massive tome, Taylor challenges denizens of the North Atlantic world seriously to consider this question: "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable" (25)? 

While Taylor devotes 871 pages attempting to answer this question, commentators over the last ten years have authored many more pages describing, analyzing, acclaiming and critiquing what Taylor wrote then, and what he has been writing in response to those who have written about what he wrote then.

I want today to discuss the dilemmas Taylor discusses in chapters 17 and 18 of A Secular Age as to their apologetic effectiveness.  Does he manage to point to an Anknuepfungspunkt ("point of contact") for those seeking to proclaim the gospel into the post-modern context?  Do these chapters succeed in uncovering a possible ground upon which an open hearing of the gospel is made more likely?  Is it possible that Taylor has articulated something the could remove an "obstacle to faith?"  In order to understand what Taylor is doing in these chapters, however, I will first have to say something about what had happened in the six hundred pages prior to Taylor's discussion of these dilemmas.

The Narrative

Taylor addresses the question as to why belief in God is now so difficult by providing a grand narrative.  The first 14 chapters -- four of the five main sections of the book -- tell the story of how it came to be that belief in God "seems" now implausible to a great many.  Taylor's story shows how "exclusive humanism" became an of option for a full human life.

Taylor's tale departs from what many expect, the story that as science waxes, religion wanes. He argues against "subtraction theories," views suggesting that the positive aspects of modernity emerge only after religious belief is jettisoned.  Taylor believes that the often intolerant, modern secularist world-view presupposes all of the following:
  • The success of science in explaining that which religion fails to explain
  • The psychological and moral maturity of modern man and women over the childishness of viewing the world religiously
  • The ethical and moral inferiority of religion in its misanthropy and resistance to human self-actualization 
Taylor's tale starts with the story of disenchantment: the early modern rejection of the traditional porous cosmos in which good and evil reside in regions beyond the human heart, and its affirmation of a world of individual buffered selves affecting and being affected by the external world and other buffered agents outside the self and in that world.  Taylor refers to this process as the "great disembedding," a process that undercuts the previous embedding of human agents within society, a society which itself is embedded in a cosmos ultimately grounded in God (152).  In this disembedding, society is refigured, it is now seen as a collection of individuals, each with interests, one of which is happiness.   

In this world of buffered selves the notion of autonomous moral agency develops.  Taylor dedicates chunks of his text to the rise of reform movements beginning five hundred years ago.  It is part of disenchantment to reform the world and the self in conformity with the putative will of God.  

By the time of the Enlightenment, a "providential deism" is in the air, an affirmation of the divine in which God increasingly functions to support human happiness, particularly a this-worldly nurturing of family life.  However, as the implications of the buffered self and its autonomous moral agency become apparent, Enlightenment men and women begin to sense that their disembedded, disenchanted existence is one of isolated human agency within an impersonal natural order.  

Throughout this narrative, Taylor is less interested in describing historical theories and ideas than in discussing the background conditions making doctrinal theories and practical piety possible.  These conditions he labels "social imaginaries," the set of pre-ontic dealings buffered selves have with each other and the objects in their environment.  Such pre-ontic dealings constitute the pre-articulated phenomenological world we all inhabit.  This world was once one where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, and now is one where it is inescapably easy not to believe.  Although Taylor does not use the term, he is engaged in genetic phenomenology, a description of the genesis of the meaning of things, in "laying bare" that world in which we now find ourselves in our judging, affirming and denying. 

As denizens of an impersonal natural order, we are not long content.  With Christian belief no longer a live option for the intelligentsia, new ways of seeking "fullness" arise in the nineteenth century.  Romanticism and its search for beauty plays prominently in various nineteenth century trajectories seeking fullness in non-explicitly Christian ways.  

Taylor seemingly employs the term 'fullness' salvifically.  Human beings have a drive to lives of fullness, a fullness thatTaylor often connects to agape love.  He suggests that fullness is an experience of the conveying of what matters most in life in a complete and perfect way (600-601).  Accordingly, such fullness could be grounded in a deep structure within us, e.g., reason, or it might perhaps be graced by the divine.  

The search for fullness, while once tethered for Christian to ends outside life, becomes in the 18th and 19th centuries increasingly connected to an "exclusive humanism," to a this-worldly ordering of society and culture for mutual benefit.  Such humanism espouses a benevolence motivated either by Enlightenment reason or the natural "fellow feeling" (Hume) men and women have for each other.  Exclusive humanism develops, providing an alternative to faith in God, miracles and mystery.  Positively, because of the development of dignity, freedom and discipline, exclusive humanism grants to buffered selves an expanded sense of self-worth.  Negatively, it displays to them their own limitations and inculcates within them a sense of alienation and emptiness.  

What follows is the "nova effect," an explosion of religious and spiritual options, a "galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."  This intensifies into the current "age of authenticity," the growth of a widespread "expressive individualism" focusing on fashion, style and individual rights.  While traditional objects of religious devotion and belief have been marginalized in this age, new kinds of spiritualities and new places of the sacred have arisen to take their place.  Even Christian belief gets a new lease on life, for though Christendom is no longer, new Christian spirituality allows for a "believing without belonging" (528). In this age of authenticity religious searching continues as numbers of people still look for religious answers to the question of the meaning of life. 

I have said a few words about Taylor's narrative to contextualize and set up the last section of his text, the last five chapters which provide a structural analysis of our present age, an age where men and women are seeming haunted by a transcendence that they cannot quite affirm.  It is in this section that we finally turnTaylor's dilemmas, the primary focus of my remarks.  It also is in this section that we find Taylor taking up the apologetic task, not one that demonstrates the truth of the Christian faith, but rather one that attempts to point to and undercut the smug and confident secularist construal of things.  

The Analysis

We dwell today within the "immanent frame," that space that has resulted from our disenchantment from the cosmos and the emergence of the buffered self, a self which is individual, private and disciplined, a self that has set out to reform the world, a world vanquished from higher time, a world living the banality of homogenous "lower" time.  This immanent frame is a "natural order" rather than a "supernatural" one, a self-sufficient world we all inhabit pre-reflectively, a frame "common to all of us in the modern west" (543).  Moreover, this immanent frame can either be open to the transcendent or closed to it.  However, Taylor emphasizes that both of these possibilities step "beyond available reasons" into a state of "anticipatory confidence" or faith (550).  The immanent frame is given to us phenomenologically and pre-reflectively; it is the primordial world in which we dwell, a world prior to reason-giving, a realm prior to normative evaluation.  

Within the immanent frame both closed and open "spins" and "takes" are possible.  While a "take" in the immanent frame affirms either immanence or transcendence while remaining open to the disjunct it does not affirm, a "spin" does not recognize itself as an interpretation of the cross-pressuring within the immanent frame towards either immanence or transcendence, and accordingly denies plausibility to the disjunct it does not affirm.  Simply put, a "spin," unlike a "take," does not know itself to be simply a way of seeing things; it thinks it stands on the facts.

Taylor believes that in the immanent frame, genuine "Jamesian space" exists towards the possibility of transcendence.  (In the seemingness of immanence, there is a haunting of transcendence, a haunting that might give one reason ultimately to adopt a position of openness towards transcendence.)  While Taylor makes passing reference to religious fundamentalism as a spin in the immanent frame towards transcendence that cannot grasp how one could not discern transcendence, it is the academy and its intolerance to the very possibility of transcendence that is his real interest.  The "fundamentalism" of the academy mistakes its way of seeing things with fact.  Taylor wishes to contest the "spin of closure which is hegemonic in the Academy" (549).  In so doing, he searches for the motivation behind closed spins which inter alia identifies openness to the transcendent as wishful thinking. 

There exist "closed world structures," all of which function as "unchallenged axioms" by believers both secular and religious (590). The philosophical picture undergirding closed world structures is foundationalist epistemology, specifically the internalist epistemological project stretching back to Descartes.  Accordingly, we have representations of a basic nature that are sense impressions, copies of sense impressions, and (for the rationalists) innate ideas.  From these basic epistemological building blocks, we build up our world.  What is closer to the foundations is more certain; what farther away more conjectural.  Obviously, any putative transcendent is disenfranchised by this starting point in "the given" because there are no foundations from which the complex idea of the transcendent can be properly derived.

Taylor argues that the foundationalist story is not a discovery of how thing are, but rather a new interpretation constructed by the buffered self.  He writes that this new story is a "stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses" (560).

Although Taylor does not explicitly say it, closed world structures are the way in which we dwell with, or reside in involvement with, entities (objects and persons) within our world.  Like a Heideggerian existentiale, closed world structures are distinctive ways in which our care and concern about the world in which we dwell present themselves.  (See James Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, Eerdmans, 97.)  The secularist spin on the immanent frame is a way in which humans comport themselves in the world, a way which occludes God.  What is this way?

The way of closed spin is a way of dwelling in a world of "there is this and no more" (my phrase).  The tug of the Augustinian "my heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord," is now phenomenologically given not as a tug to deeper truth, but as temptation and distraction away from the only truth there is (563), the truth of "there is this and no more."  The way of being-in-the-world without God is not a discovery given to us by science, but a way in which we now comport ourselves with entities in our world as we now do science.  We dwell in the world as ones who are alone, who without God and pre-established purpose must make up a story for ourselves, a story of courage to appreciate and affirm our aloneness.  Dwelling alone in the world, we understand that our norms and values are the only ones that actually exist.  In our being-in-the-world we pre-understand that our moral autonomy gives us the only dignity we can possess, a dignity that has now come to maturity.  We are no longer children; we see the world as it is.  We reside in our world in a "there is this and no more" way.  Any attempt to affirm differently is wishful thinking and a mark of immaturity and/or childishness.  Clearly, Taylor is pointing to a powerful image and a heady dwelling -- this way of seeing the immanent as if it were not possible to see more than the "there is this and no more."

Despite the hegemonic closed spin in the academy and vast sections of culture, "cross-pressuring" abounds, that is, conflict between "the draw of narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other," the memory of transcendence and its enlightened rejection, conflict arises between old destabilized beliefs and emerging new ones (595). Taylor believes that from the tension of cross-pressuring new spiritual possibilities can arise. 

The cross-pressuring between our drive towards fullness -- even exclusive humanists locked in the immanent frame cannot wholly abjure it! --  and our current naturalistic, materialistic, and reductionistic account of the world and how it operates, creates a tension that infects various "fields" of existence.  With respect to agency, we shrink from our own determination, and instead affirm ourselves as "active, building, creating, shaping agents."  With respect to ethics, we affirm "higher ethical/spiritual motives" that are irreducible to biological instincts.  Finally, in aesthetics we affirm meanings and purpose that "are not just differential responses to pleasure" (596). 

The Dilemmas

In Chapter 17 and 18 Taylor explicitly discusses the dilemmas produced by the cross pressures.  While these are dilemmas for Christianity, Taylor believes that they also are problematic for exclusive humanism. 

Taylor begins by pointing to the growing penchant to flatten out spiritual struggles by appealing to therapy.  If human beings desire existential wholeness, and religion and its struggles of the spirit do not produce such wholeness, then perhaps therapy can.  On the therapeutic model, "healing doesn't involve conversion" (619).  In fact, spiritual struggle and conversion is a fundamental culprit making achievement of wholeness difficult.  The therapeutic revolution assumes that spiritual insight and concern for the transcendent is itself a motive for existential disorder.  Our lives, haunted by the memory of transcendence and characterized by a lack of fullness, are now to be addressed by a therapy that regards such transcendence and fullness as a pathology.  (Much of what Taylor discusses in this section I first encountered reading Brave New World and Lord of the Flies.

Taylor believes, however, that there are significant problems with the therapeutic program.  It turns out that the guilt associated with the spiritual life is now transferred to the therapeutic life.  Did I get the right treatment?  To what degree was I effective in overcoming the spiritual?  Moreover, to call the disordered interactions of the spiritual life pathological, would suggest that much of our everyday non-spiritual disordered lives are pathological as well. 

But there are other problems that surface for religion:
  • Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) asks us to transcend our humanity in moving to embrace the higher.  This, however, mutilates us by asking us to repress what is really human (623).  
  • Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) often proclaims that the world could be other than it is.  Such a hope tends to "bowdlerize" reality, downplaying the difficult aspects of nature we all face.  
Religion's preoccupation with the ideal and transcendent denies what is deeply human in the here and now.  (It is as if the world is condemned by the divine Law.)  Moreover, preoccupation with divine promise and transformation (grace?) fails to take the here and now seriously.  (It is as if one asserts that after grace, the Law no longer applies.)  Either there is two much law or not enough.  This is a dilemma with Christian faith: "It seems hard to avoid one of these criticisms without impaling oneself on the other" (624).   

Taylor does, however, explore ways out of the dilemma.  What if we lower the bar as to what counts as transcendence, and embrace what Martha Nussbaum calls "internal transcendence," a transcendence that does not deny natural drives and passions? 

Now Taylor employs the strategy of what is good for the goose is good for the gander.  He believes that it will not work simply to make Christianity not deny human natural drives and desires, for the Enlightenment universalism ingredient in exclusive humanism also represses some of our basic human drives and passions.  In fact, exclusive humanism seems to be in no better position than Christianity when it comes to the project of leveling out the natural instincts, drives and passions of human beings in the name of good order.  (Does not the current PC movement sometimes effect a type of mutilation of the natural?)  The problem of mutilation infects both religion and exclusive humanism.  It is against both the mutilations of Christianity and exclusive humanism that the Nietzschean anti-humanist critique emerged. 

Taylor adroitly carries on a dialogue between the three partners: religious people committed to transcendence, exclusive humanists committed to the "modern moral order" of organizing society for mutual benefit, and neo-Nietzschean anti-humanists who reject both transcendence and the entire project of organizing society for mutual benefit.  On many issues, two of the partners agree over and against the third.  While the anti-humanists attack Christianity and exclusive humanism for their mutilation of the natural drives and passions of humanity, the anti-humanists and exclusive humanists stand together in attacking Christianity because of its commitment to transcendence.  Moreover, Christianity and anti-humanism seem somehow to agree about "the valorization of death and sometimes violence" over and against exclusive humanism (638). 

All of this brings us to a discussion of what Taylor calls the maximal demand: "How to define our highest spiritual and moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn't crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity" (639-640).  Here it seems that we are faced with a dilemma: we must either adjust down our moral aspirations so that our ordinary human life might flourish, or we must abandon some of our human flourishing in order to achieve our highest ideals.  Taylor argues that the dilemma of either having to adjust down our moral aspirations or our human drives and passions applies to both exclusive humanism and Christianity.  But while the grace of the eschaton is available to Christians failing the maximal demand, it is not so for exclusive humanists.   (Taylor attempts throughout this section to evaluate Christian trajectories on their basis of how they meet the maximal demand.  Unfortunately, he does not sufficiently clarify the criteria upon which to affirm or deny particular Christian belief and practice as having met that demand.)

Taylor indicates that there are other problems with which Christianity must deal.  Christianity has been deeply influenced by Platonism and its other-wordly emphasis.  So how can one square the hyper-reality of the transcendent light with the shadow (and unreality) of human drives and passions?  From the platonic perspective the "maximal demand" is really beside the point.  Moreover, how do Christian notions of sacrifice, suffering, punishment, atonement and violence survive the maximal demand to not mutilate our drives and passions?  How does an authentic Christian transcendence avoid that of Platonism, the latter of which, when conjoined to Christianity, seems to have provided profound meaning and purpose to countless through the centuries? 

The point of the dilemmas Taylor uncovers is to show that both Christianity and exclusive humanism are challenged by them.  This is particularly true of violence.  Christianity, anti-humanism and exclusive humanism all are confronted with the problem of violence, and all have difficulty coming to terms with it.  Exclusive humanism misses the deeper non-biological roots of violence while anti-humanism decouples morality from it.  But while only Christianity has the resources to think it profoundly -- and while only it believes it can be overcome -- the mere existence of the violence challenges notions of a beneficient God engaged in divine pedagogy of His children.   For Christianity, as well as exclusive and anti-humanism, there is "a fundamental ambivalence of human reality" (673). 

The question of profound meaning poses more problems.  From where comes our motivation for spiritual commitment or doing good?  Upon what "transcendence" is it based?  We deal with the experience of evil in two basic ways: Either ignore it and believe that there is nothing ultimately wrong, or address it by trying to heal and correct it.  Throughout this section, Taylor labors to show that Christianity is perhaps more open (and honest) with respect both to the recognition of evil and the attempt to ameliorate it.  He opines that exclusive humanism does not have adequate moral sources to undergird its commitment to human rights, and to treat properly the least advantaged in our society. The philanthropy of the exclusive humanist often becomes a misanthropy because those whom she helps often fail to appreciate both the gifts given and the highly developed moral nature of the giver. 

Whatever one might say about the specifics of these dilemmas, the strategy Taylor employs is important.  In doing apologetics in our postmodern, post-Christian context, one must identify the dilemmas facing both Christianity and exclusive humanism, point to the inadequacies of exclusive humanism in trying to address these dilemmas, and sketch the resources that Christianity has in addressing these dilemmas in a more profound way than exclusive humanism. 

The goal is first to get the person to see that their commitment to exclusive humanism is a take and not a spin.  This is crucial, because if the secular, the religious and the anti-humanist positions are all stories we tell ourselves, all ultimately alternate existentiales or ways of being in the world, all profoundly faith positions underdetermined by the data, then it is unreasonable to claim that one's closed take is a spin, that it is the way that things are apart from our awareness, perception, conception, interests and language.  If it is unreasonable to have a closed spin on the immanent frame, then a very significant obstacle to faith has been removed. 

Pascal once concluded that in the face of a possible infinite pay out of glory and bliss, it is unreasonable not to wager one's finite life.  Pascal knew that his wager never could bring one to faith, because that is in God's hands.  His wager was only meant to remove some obstacles to faith.  It was an Anknuepfungsspunkt whose establishment in no way undermines the gratuity of grace.

Perhaps Taylor is best read in this light.  If our closed spin is unreasonable, then perhaps we should pull back to a more defendable position, the field of takes rather than spins.  Notice that the area of either the open or closed take on the immanent is one probably more likely to hear the Word, a Word whose heard utterance rests only on the anti-foundations of the gratuity of grace.  The removal of an obstacle does not an affirmation make.  However, the honest affirmation of Christ does entail the removal of an obstacle to faith, the immanent spin on our present immanent frame.  

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Imagine

Do any of you remember "Imagine," the Lennon tune of September 1971? It is a veritable paean to the end of transcendence, and to the joys of secularity, socialism and globalization. 
Notice how strangely out-of-place talk of God is in the world below. I remember my high school reading of Brave New World and Lord of the Flies. Lennon's world was glimpsed by Huxley and others, but was just "trickling down" to the young in 1971. His world is now metropolitan America; it is the urban landscape of the weary North Atlantic countries. We are jaded and lost. Heidegger thought only a god could save us now. Will the owl yet fly before dusk? 
It is against this background that the Gospel must be proclaimed, and it is into this context that it must again be received. 
_______________________________________
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, you
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one