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. 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 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." "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."--Jacket.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
31mentions
10people
2017–2026years
61% recommend39% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might be interested in a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Kaufmann. Basically a lot of it comes down to birth rates and cohesiveness of culture.
Another good one is A Secular Age, although it's on a much longer timeline. It tracks the shift of Christianity from ±1500 to the present and what it will likely be in the near future.
- One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.)
And so a result of this is that they fail to notice the same recurring psychological patterns that underly thoughts about how the world is, and how it will be in the future - and then adjust their positions because of this awareness.
For example - this AI inevitabilism stuff is not dissimilar to many ideas originally from the Reformation, like predestination. The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. On a psychological level it’s the same thing: an offloading of freedom and responsibility to a powerful, vaguely defined force that may or may not exist outside the collective minds of human society.
- > The general continuity in Waugh’s life and writing is contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect sense in that light.
I'm christian and this describes the most troublesome converts. Both in the trouble they cause the rest of us and the trouble they experience themselves.
The thing they miss, and also maybe you, and also probably Waugh, is that religions are in one sense much older but in another much more serious and experiential sense they are modern.
They are practiced by modern people, with modern patterns of thought, navigating modern problems in modern ways. The wisdom may be ancient but your life isn't, your belief isn't. You can't go home again, you can't swim in the same river twice, you can't prevent the fall, you can't put the family back together, you can't practice the religion of st anthony or even of your great grandfather. A modern person can only practice a modern christianity and this includes catholicism.
Now, I still think you are right about waugh there. He did have contempt for modernity and did probably turn to catholicism to escape it. But I don't believe he found what he was looking for, because it simply isn't there to be found.
Charles Taylor explores this problem/contradiction/experience in incredible depth in A Secular Age. I wish waugh had been able to read it but I wonder if he would have.
- There is this really useful word, immanence, that I wish were more widely known. Basically it means “focused on this world and human experience.”
I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on.
I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
- Disenchantment (the term used to describe the loss of magic in the world) is a bit more complicated and started earlier. Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age is an excellent read if you’re interested in how (and if) it happened:
https://intotheclarities.com/2014/08/23/charles-taylor-on-di...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age
It’s a huge tome but one detail worth mentioning is that Taylor says disenchantment goes back to at least the Reformation (1500s-1600s), as that’s when “strong belief” became more important. Prior to that, religion was essentially on various speeds, with the religious establishment “believing more” and the rest of society believing at a less serious level, content to live in a world of mixed beings, magic, etc. Once the Reformation kicked off, it became much more important to clarify and commit to the beliefs - which also had the unintended result of many people analyzing their beliefs and not believing them anymore.
I can’t summarize the whole thing here, but I highly recommend it. I also think Taylor recently published a book about Romantic poetry, which is apt considering the blog post’s discussion of Coleridge.
- A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. So much of contemporary conflicts / culture / etc. have been illuminated to me by understanding this book. It’s super long, however, so you may want to read How Not to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith first, which is a summary of the larger book.
