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"How (Not) To Be Secular" - Reading Charles Taylor, by James KA Smith (Book Review)


I have two attempts under my belt to read Taylor's tome "A Secular Age", and I still did not get past the 150 page mark each time. Taylor's "A Secular Age" is very hard for the novice, arm-chair philosopher. It'll be more of a book that I will explore throughout my life rather than reading in one sitting.


Enter Smith's summary, a book about a book. Thanks, James KA Smith.


Yet even here, to attempt to summarize Smith's summary of Taylor's work would be complicated. And that is my take away. Our age of belief is much more complicated than we realize. The question asked at the beginning of the book - in our Western Civilization, how did we move from a full acceptance of belief in God to an age where for many, belief in God seems irrational and even impossible?


The shift is long and nuanced, containing many layers. However, it seems to have (accidently) began with the reformation and the Reformers. The rise of exclusive humanism and what Taylor calls living life in the "immanent frame" slowly evolved once belief was made possible outside of the institutional church. Over the centuries, once it became personalized and "up to you" did the splits of potential worldviews and philosophies and understanding about our human condition begin multiplying into oblivion, resulting in various Nietzschean-approaches to definitions of our human existence.


His explanation of the "cross pressures" that create the "buffered self" is very helpful. I'll try and diagram it below: TRANSCENDENCE

ENCHANTMENT BUFFERED SELF DISENCHANTMENT


IMMANENCE


The idea here in my very lame representation of the better diagram found in this book is that transcendence, enchantment and disenchantment, founded with the immanent living of today, creates cross-pressures on to wrestle with meaning. To quote Smith/Taylor here, "Taylor's analysis of this point is deeply existential. As he puts it, while the world is disenchanted for 'us moderns' we nonetheless also experience a sense of loss and malaise in the wake of such disenchantment (pg 302)... All sorts of people feel themselves caught in these cross-pressures - pushed by immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might be a loss of transcendence." (pg. 63)


Taylor generally argues that there is a 'haunting' that still rests in the West from its Christian-European heritage that there is more to life than living in the day to day immanence (and arguably, I'd say, this haunting is due to humans being in the image of God, but Taylor is not a theologian). We've attempted to disenchant our world, de-supernaturalize it, yet it simply hasn't worked (and probably will never work). Human nature simply says otherwise.


He argues well that us Westerners are on the look out for some sort of structure or frame of belief that makes sense of our lives, and that structure becomes the reference point for meaning. The implication here is, unthinkable to your average Westerner pre-1600, is that there is a loss of meaning, and we're trying to cope with it how we can.


This usually leads us to an attempt into develop "Closed World Structures" that provide an closed-take, an all encompassing framework to understand our existence. This leads to the "worldview" of science where, as Taylor (or Smith argues Taylor argues?) that science enters as an option in that closed world structure not so much because of evidence, but rather because of its claim of authority (pg. 102) - just another bread crumb evidence of our internal longings for a transcendent, outside of us authority to impose meaning on us.


There is so much more to his argument that would take an enormously long review to summarize (the above is far from all of Taylor's argument, so don't let my summary cheapen the intellectual prowess and the broad historical and philosophical treatment that Taylor gives to the subject, I just don't have time to work through it all here!) - I'll jump to his conclusions: our current Western world and its belief structures are fragile and haunted by the desire for the transcendence, and even for Christianity to some extent as the continual background noise for Western culture (did anyone hear Amazing Grace be sung at our recent presidential inauguration? Did anyone keep count of all the Scripture quoted during the event? Christianity seems to haunt most everything in culture today).

It's fragility is found in how we try and cope with sin as replaced by the therapeutic, desire for personal transformation replaced by a tendency for victimhood, cultural pressure of a civilized treatment of neighbor and our environment by shame and guilt rather than any sort of visional belief structure, and the reality (an unprovable one, really) that when the tyrant of death approaches, one cannot help but feel that it is out of place, and that there must be something more to life.


Taylor predicts that, harkening back to TS Eliot, that this will only amplify a wasteland of cultural belief and meaning. In his words,


"...the heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a 'waste land' for subsequent generations, and many young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries." Yes and Amen, may that day come! In fact, I think it is already here.


Then, Smith concludes his book with this excellent paragraph:


"The aridity of that waste land, coupled with the persistent pressure of transcendence that cannot be explained away, will continue to generate 'third ways' of various sorts. In that cross-pressured space, some will begin to feel - and be honest about - the paucity of a 'closed take.' And in ways that they never could have anticipated, some will begin to wonder if renunciation isn't the way to wholeness, and that freedom might be found in the gift of constraint, and that the strange rituals of Christian worship are the answer to their most human aspirations, as if, for their whole lives, they've been waiting for [a] Saint Francis" (pg. 139).


Highly recommend this book. And if anyone wants to tackle Taylor's tome with me... let me know.

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