Yes, I’m still alive! After a stretch of physical therapy and a
regime of regular exercise, I feel ready to at least try the blogging
thing again. Because it still seems like the best medium for discussing
Serious Books. And I’ve been reading a doozy.
Charles Taylor’s
A Secular Age is one of those books to which it seems apt to apply the aphorism created for
A Brief History Of Time:
“Millions bought it, and thousands finished it.” Only in this case, I
expect that both numbers are a lot smaller. But anyway, way back in
April 2008 I
mentioned to Russell Arben Fox
that I was in the first chapter of the book. And so I remained, for
quite a while. But now, after my third attempt, I’m in the fourth
chapter! And so I blog.
So yeah, Taylor isn’t the world’s most page-turning writer. But I
keep going because his subject is so interesting, and so huge: why did
the modern West, of all places and times, bring the birth of secularism?
And a sub-question, of particular interest to me: how did the world
become disenchanted? I mean, we all know that at some point in the last
few hundred years a whole lot of people stopped believing in fairies,
witches, demons and so on, and this made it a whole lot more difficult
to believe in God. But how and why did that happen? Obviously scientific
discovery was a factor, but you have to be in a certain frame of mind
to be looking for those discoveries and interpreting them in that way.
And this is what Taylor attempts to explain.
To set things up, however, Taylor does a remarkable job of describing
the “enchanted world” of ancient pagans and how it was different from
ours — both on the societal level and on the level of individual
consciousness. As he puts it, to live in the enchanted world is to live
with a “porous self,” in which experiences that we attribute entirely to
the brain could originate elsewhere in the body or come from outside
the body entirely. This does not just refer to the experiences that we
would now call hallucinations or mental illness, but emotions, meanings,
and morals. So if you fall in love, for instance, that is a personal
experience of yours, but it also means you’ve come under the aegis of
Aphrodite, or some similar being.
In contrast to this, Taylor defines the modern self as a “buffered”
self, a relatively detached consciousness in a world of inert matter.
Even with the advent of modern neurology, there’s still a notion that
the “self” is in some private untouchable place; as Taylor points out,
someone who’s told that they’re depressed because of a neurochemical
imbalance can distance themselves from the experience, and say “it’s not
really me.” By contrast, an ancient person might have been told that he
has an excess of black bile, but that doesn’t somehow separate it from
his consciousness; black bile was not just seen as a cause of melancholy
but melancholy itself, unmediated.
In one way, this is all very weird; but in another way most of us
know it if we remember back far enough. Children naturally tend toward
the enchanted world, a fact which adults regard with a mixture of
nostalgia and contempt. So parents read fairy tales to their children
and tell them about Santa Claus, but then tell them that these things
are make-believe and make-believe things don’t count in this world. More
subtly, those experiences that might seem to come from spirits —
dreams, artistic inspiration, flashes of insights, sudden uncontrollable
emotions — are rounded up and put into the domain of the mind, and thus
become the responsibility of the conscious will. The dismissal of the
enchanted world as juvenile is, according to Taylor, a large part of how
we enforce modern thinking.
But in the days when people grew to adulthood and elderhood in the
enchanted world, this way of thinking had profound effects on how they
viewed society and nature. One important thing to realize here is that
all these spirits and gods, which we call supernatural, actually were
considered nature by pagans. Spirits were just what made nature run, and
they had their own interests and desires that could be in conflict with
human beings or with each other. And for the ancient pagan, nature was
the all in all and couldn’t be escaped from, merely adapted to. By the
same token, a person’s goals were very natural and worldly: health,
prosperity, honor, sex and so on.
It’s when this is translated to the social and political realm that
the modern brain really needs to stretch itself — or at least mine did.
Because in the modern way of thinking, any time people come together —
whether as a family, a social clique, a business, a church, a political
unit, or whatever — it seems to require some purpose. It may be a
purpose as frivolous as having a good time on a Saturday night, but it
may be as grave as ensuring the well-being of millions of people. Either
way, though, there is this assumption that the structure and roles
within the group are geared toward some purpose — and if something else
works better for that purpose, feel free to rearrange.
However, the ancients mostly saw human community not as instrumental,
but natural. Of course, nowadays when someone talks about a “natural
order of society” it usually prefaces some dubious theory about
evolutionary psychology and genes. But the ancients didn’t think in
biology either. The analogy Taylor makes is that society was thought of
as a kind of organism unto itself, which like other organisms, has a
state of being “healthy” from which deviation is “sick.” And thus it is
evaluated not by looking forwards towards a goal, but by comparing the
state of things to an archetypal “form.” Yet to say that keeping to the
forms is entirely a matter of human will would also be thinking too much
like a buffered self; according to Taylor, forms were thought of as
growing into maturity just like organisms. Thus humans defied them at
their own peril.
The basic shape of pagan society is what Taylor calls “hierarchical
complementarity.” And here some might object that he’s painting with an
overly broad brush. After all, there was, and is, a great range in the
amount of hierarchy found in pagan societies — from the god-kings of
Egypt to the democracy of Athens to a great many independent clans that
had no government at all. But I would say, in my capacity as an amateur
student of anthropology, that even the most egalitarian pagan societies
don’t think of equality in terms of modern Western legal and moral
equality, which is ultimately about interchangeability — everyone has
the same rights regardless of their particulars. Think about how many
discussions of fairness involve counterfactual swaps, e.g., “Would you
say the same if that happened to your daughter? If you switched the
races/genders? If you’d been born in the time/place that that person
was?” Instead, everyone in every kind of ancient society was embedded in
a family, a clan, and thus their identities and moral duties were
defined by their particular relationships with those particular people.
And this itself made them vulnerable to some particular forms of
hierarchy, which some ancient societies took to the nth degree.
One primordial source of authority was age. Even if you’re living in a
simple hunter-gatherer clan, you know that state of dependence on your
parents and other older relations. And even when you grow up, the elders
have wisdom and knowledge and experience over you (and are also
“libraries” in non-literate societies). And — here is where the
enchanted world comes in again — that respect for your elders doesn’t
have to end just because they die. Shamans the world over have made it
their business to communicate with ancestors, and regular folks
frequently have rituals to honor, placate, or care for them. It’s not
uncommon for dead ancestors, especially if they distinguished themselves
in life, to be thought of as gaining supernatural powers in the next
world, and thus becoming godlike. Officially, this was what the Roman
imperial cult was about: and emperor could only be deified after his
death, though some regarded this as a license to act like gods while
they were alive.
However, if we can’t understand pagan relationships by limiting them
to the living, we also can’t understand them by limiting them to the
human. As I said earlier, the ancients saw nature as a realm of sentient
spirits, some of them very very powerful. So some ancient rulers
clothed themselves in the authority of these nature gods. The most
obvious example of this is the pharaohs of Egypt, who associated
themselves with the sun god, and participated daily in rituals that were
believed to ensure the annual flooding of the Nile and other natural
events that Egyptians depended on.
In the first millennium B.C., however, religions and philosophies
started to spring up that challenged this view of the natural/social
order. For our purposes, let’s just focus on the obvious one. The strict
monotheism of the Jews challenged the powers of god-kings, as we see in
Yahweh’s showdowns with Pharaoh and Baal. But this isn’t just a case of
two tribal gods duking it out. Yahweh wasn’t a god representing a
natural phenomenon, a god “of” something or other. He was a god
above
all those things, who used nature as his instrument. This would turn
out to be very important in the secular age, as we shall see.
Christianity, when it came along, questioned the natural order even
more radically, by saying that the apparently eternal order of nature
isn’t actually God’s ultimate plan. Jesus talked on and on about how
this order was going to be turned upside down, and what looked like
human flourishing was actually the opposite. So love your enemies, lose
your life so you might gain it, the humble shall be exalted, don’t worry
about tomorrow, don’t save money. After Jesus rose from the dead, Paul
concluded that death was not, in fact, an integral part of nature but an
evil that had been conquered.
Needless to say, the near-term apocalypse that a lot of early
Christians seemed to be expecting didn’t happen. Instead they found
themselves in the place where Christians still live today, in an age
when the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God coexist. And even
more needless to say, the amount of faith required to live in the
kingdom of God when the kingdom of the world is so real and immediate is
beyond the grasp of a lot of people, a lot of the time. Thus a
bifurcation formed between what Taylor calls the religious “virtuosi” —
the saints, monastics, hermits and others who gave everything up for
Christ — and the ordinary folks who were in it because it seemed like
the way to get along or get ahead. And so the church eventually was
absorbed into the very hierarchical complementarity that it challenged.
“From the beginning, mankind has been divided into three parts,
among men of prayer, farmers, and men of war,” wrote Gerard of Cambrai
in the 11th century, describing the three-part harmony of medieval
society.
However, it wasn’t long after he wrote those words that it all started to unravel. That will be the subject of the next post.
