Monday, March 29, 2010

Rekulturisasi Syariat Islam (Catatan untuk M Ishom El Saha)

Rekulturisasi Syariat Islam (Catatan untuk M Ishom El Saha)

Tulisan saya terdahulu yang bertajuk, “Formalisasi Syariat Islam, Mengapa Tidak?” (Media Indonesia, 6/10/2000) adalah sebuah wacana yang berupaya menepis pesimisme formalisasi syariat Islam dilihat dari sisi politis. Pandangan yang saya kemukakan lebih sebagai sebuah respons terhadap aras pemikiran yang berkembang pada saat itu—yang cenderung sinis dan pesimistis—serta sekadar ingin menunjukkan kekecewaan saya terhadap aktivisme politik umat Islam yang sangat tidak kondusif bagi terwujudnya upaya tersebut. Hal ini dapat dipahami, karena faktor politik adalah salah satu indikator penting bagi niscaya atau tidaknya penegakan syariat Islam di negeri ini.

Perdebatan dalam tema yang sama kini kembali menghangat. Kali ini penekanan (stressing) diskusi diarahkan pada peluang formalisasi syariat Islam dilihat dari sisi budaya termasuk yurisdisial. Namun agaknya masih memunculkan nuansa yang hampir serupa, yakni irama sinis dan pesimistis. Hal ini dapat dicermati dari ketiga tulisan sebelumnya oleh Topo Santoso dalam “Penyoal Penegakan Syariat Islam” (MI, 15/6/2001), Sulthan Fathoni dalam “Syariat Islam, Antara Cita dan fakta” (MI, 6/7/2001), dan M. Ishom El Saha dalam “Problem Yuridisial Syariat Islam” (MI, 13/7/2001). Dari ketiga artikel tersebut, tampaknya tulisan saudara M. Ishom El Saha (Ishom) menarik untuk dikritisi.

Maraknya tuntutan penegakan syariat Islam akhir-akhir ini, dalam sebuah pernyataan Ishom, lebih merupakan ‘kelatahan’ wacana yang menjangkiti umat Islam sejalan dengan euforia kebebasaan sebagai ekses negatif dari gerakan reformasi. Oleh karenanya, tuntutan semacam ini tidak lebih hanya sebuah ‘pengharapan’ (estimate) umat Islam yang jauh panggang dari api. Demikian salah satu sorotan Ishom berkenaan dengan fenomena di atas.

Benarkah demikian? Tidak juga benar. Sebab, kesadaran politik umat Islam, terutama para elite politik, berkenaan dengan keinginan pemberlakuan syariat Islam dalam sistem hukum dan politik di Indonesia sesungguhnya bukan ide baru, apalagi sekadar basa-basi. Keinginan (political will) tersebut, jika dirunut dalam sejarah, telah lahir setua usia negara kesatuan Republik Indonesia. Fenomena penghapusan ‘tujuh kata’ dalam Piagam Jakarta adalah fakta sejarah yang tak dapat dibantah. Peristiwa tersebut membuktikan betapa kuat keinginan para elite politik Islam pada saat itu, yakni menghendaki penegakan syariat Islam secara konstitusional (formalisasi), tidak dalam lingkup personal (cermati kasus penerapan hukum rajam di Maluku atas inisiatif penuh laskar jihad ahlussunah waljama’ah dan masyarakat setempat di bawah pimpinan ustadz Ja’far Umar Thalib). Dari titik ini, tampaknya Ishom telah melupakan sejarah (ahistoris).

Kesan melupakan sejarah (ahistoris) juga tampak dalam pandangannya yang menafikan yuridisial atau sistem yurisdiksi Islam dalam rentang kepemimpinan Muhammad Saw. hingga awal abad XVIII. Padahal, performance Muhammad Saw. disamping sebagai seorang utusan pembawa ajaran Allah Swt., berupa sistem keberagaan yang disebut “Syariat”, juga memerankan peranan yang lain menyangkut fungsi eksekutor (imâmah) dan yudikator (mahkamah/qadhâ’). (QS. Al-Nisâ’: 51, al-Mâ’idah: 65, 105)

Meski masih terlampau bersahaja jika diukur dengan sistem kekinian, penegakan hukum (law enforcement) berdasarkan syariat Islam pada masa itu, seperti dipaparkan Muhammad Salam Madkur dalam Al-Qadhâ’ fi al-Islâm (1964), telah diwujudkan dengan sangat baik oleh umat Islam di bawah kepemimpinan Rasulullah Saw.. Dan terbukti, kurun ini menjadi proyek percontohan (pilot project) bagi perwujudan masyarakat Islam yang ideal atau masyarakat madani (khayr al-qurûn qarni). Oleh karenanya, kesederhanaan sistem peradilan dan perundang-undangan, pada masa itu, tidaklah tepat untuk dijadikan sebagai alasan untuk menafikan yuridisial syariat Islam.

Dari sisi ini juga, Ishom melontarkan kekhawatirannya akan gagalnya formalisasi syariat Islam, dengan merujuk pada rencana pemberlakuan hukum Islam di Aceh dengan UU Nangroe-nya dan kekisruhan konstitusi politik di Iran, dengan menyorot resistensi walâyat al-Faqîh sebagai sebuah sampel. Saya menduga, kekhawatiran ini merupakan refleksi ketidakyakinannya—dan keraguan banyak pihak—terhadap kekuatan syariat Islam sebagai sebuah solusi. Padahal sistem keberagamaan Islam menghendaki keyakinan dan implementasi hukum-hukum Allah (syariat Islam) tanpa tawar-menawar (QS. al-Mâ’idah: 47, 48, dan 50). Dengan demikian, penegakan syariat Islam dengan segala risikonya dalam konteks teologi Islam menjadi hal yang sangat menjanjikan disamping merupakan bagian dari sistem keimanan umat Islam yang tidak pantas diragukan.

Oleh karenanya, syariat Islam dan umat Islam sejatinya menjadi dua variabel yang menyatu. Karena komitmen atau penundukkan diri seorang muslim (al-islâm) kepada Islam mengandung konsekuensi bahwa ia siap menerima segala aturan main yang ada di dalamnya. Dalam perspektif sejarah hukum kolonial Belanda, Van Den Berg (1645—1927) memberikan pengakuan secara politis dan ilmiah terhadap kenyataan di atas melalui teori Receptio in Cimplexu. Menurutnya, hukum Islam diberlakukan secara penuh terhadap para pemeluknya, meskipun dalam pengamalannya terdapat perbedaan yang tidak substansial antara masyarakat Arab dan umat Islam di Indonesia. Dalam sistem hukum Indonesia, penerapan hukum ini pun telah dilakukan dengan diundangkannya UU Perkawinan no. 1 tahun 1974, UU Peradilan Agama no. 7 tahun 1989, Kompilasi Hukum Islam (KHI) melalui inpres no. 1 tahun 1991, dan beberapa peraturan perundang-undangan yang lain.

Pemberlakuan beberapa perundang-undangan di atas setidaknya dapat membuka mata kita akan keniscayaan formalisasi syariat Islam di Indonesia, terlepas dari pro-kontra menyangkut materi dan pengolahan perundang-undangan, seperti yang disinyalisasi Ishom dalam kasus KHI. Namun ironinya, perundang-undangan tersebut masih belum dirasakan—oleh sebagian besar umat Islam—sebagai sumbangsih dan merupakan bagian dari syariat Islam. Dari titik ini saya melihat kuatnya pengaruh budaya (culture) yang berakibat lemahnya pengakuan dan pengetahuan (pemahaman) umat Islam terhadap syariat Islam.

Rekulturisasi: Sebuah Solusi

Persoalan krusial yang selalu mengkandaskan ide pemberlakuan syariat Islam dalam semua lini, termasuk dalam lingkup parlementariat, adalah menyangkut tingkat kesadaran umat Islam terhadap urgensi formalisasi syariat Islam di Indonesia. Hal ini menjadi dapat dipahami jika mencermati dua persoalan sejarah politik hukum yang—langsung atau tidak—telah berimplikasi pada pola pikir dan sikap keberagamaan (baca. budaya) umat Islam. Pertama, strategi politik hukum penjajah Belanda yang diinspirasikan oleh sosok Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857—1936) telah menanamkan pemahaman yang keliru terhadap keberadaan hukum Islam, terutama di Jawa. Dengan teori hukum “receptie”-nya, Hurgronje membenamkan keraguan di benak bangsa Indonesia—terutama umat Islam—terhadap keunggulan sistem hukum Islam dibanding sistem hukum lainnya (hukum Adat dan Barat). Teori receptie meniscayakan pemberlakuan syariat Islam di tengah-tengah masyarakat jika memiliki relevansi atau kesesuaian dengan hukum adat. Teori ini, dengan demikian, secara politis telah menjatuhkan pamor hukum Islam di mata para pemeluknya.

Pemikiran politis yang juga diimplementasikan dalam kebijakan pemerintah kolonial ini tidak hanya berimplikasi pada surutnya legitimasi (delegimitation), tapi secara perlahan melahirkan pemahaman yang salah (misinterptretation) terhadap syariat Islam itu sendiri. Dan dalam perkembangan selanjutnya, pemahaman mengenai syariat Islam mulai mengalami bias. Syariat Islam dianggap sebagai hukum Islam, dan hukum Islam selalu diidentikan dengan sadisme hukum pidana Islam yang Arabsentris itu. Padahal syariat Islam tidak sekadar hukum Islam (al-hukm al-Islâmi) yang kerap dicitrakan—oleh sementara orang dengan hukum pidana—pelanggaran terhadap Hak Asasi Manusia itu. Syariat Islam adalah sistem yang mengantur kehidupan umat Islam secara totalitas, baik spiritual-vertikal (mahdhah) maupun sosial-horizontal (mu’âmalah), termasuk di dalamnya aspek individual (privacy). Pemahaman yang salah—sebagai pengaruh dari politik hukum kolonial—itu agaknya masih dirasakan pengaruhnya terhadap pemikiran umat Islam hingga kini, terutama bagi yang merasa alergi terhadap pemberlakuan syariat Islam.

Kedua, strategi politik hukum orde baru sesungguhnya tidak seluruhnya memiliki nilai positif. Setidaknya pada permulaan kekuasaan rezim ini. Tesis Robert W. Hefner (2000: ix) yang menyebutkan bahwa kepemimpinan orde baru memiliki orientasi nilai yang dirujuk pada sistem nilai Hindu–Budha—dan inilah yang menjadi alasan mereka untuk berusaha mengontrol Islam politik—agaknya memiliki relevansi. Kecenderungan ini, pada akhirnya membuat umat Islam secara politis terpinggirkan.

Mengikuti alur politik orde baru memang cukup membingungkan. Pada masa-masa awal pemerintahannya, rezim orde baru begitu dekat dengan umat Islam. Hal ini dilakukan dalam rangka mencari kawan dalam kampanye penghancuran Partai komunis Indonesia (PKI). Dari sisi ini umat Islam sesungguhnya telah dimanfaatkan secara politis. Kebijakan ini berubah secara substansial pada awal tahun 1970-an, rezim tersebut melepas semua pretensi kerja sama dan berusaha menahan organisasi-organisasi Islam sekaligus. Untuk tujuan ini, penguasa orde baru membangkitkan kembali formula penjajah Belanda. Kebijakan tersebut menggabungkan toleransi terhadap “Islam normatif” dengan kontrol yang keras terhadap semua bentuk “Islam Politik”.

Perlakuan yang represif terhadap Islam politik tersebut, dalam pandangan saya, akhirnya telah berakibat mandulnya kekuatan Islam dari sisi perjuangan parlementariat (politik) dan jatuhnya pamor Islam, dalam hal ini ajarannya (syariat Islam). Tindakan-tindakan rezim ini telah pula membuat umat Islam tidak memiliki keberanian dalam menyuarakan aspirasinya. Pemicu semua ini, sebagaimana disinyalisasi Robert W. Hefner, adalah adanya persaingan politik antara “Islam abangan” dan “Islam santri”. Kedua hal yang bernuansa politis di atas, dengan demikian, memiliki pengaruh yang cukup kuat terhadap penilaian dan penerimaan syariat Islam sebagai sistem ajaran yang terlembagakan dalam politik.

Syariat Islam yang notabene lahir di Arab harus diakui memiliki spesifikasi sosiologis. Yakni bernuansa Arabsentris. Hukum Islam yang lahir pada waktu itu memang memiliki kedekatan dengan pola hidup bangsa Arab jika dilihat dari sisi budaya. Namun tetap tidak menghilangkan keuniversalan ajarannya yang menjadi karakteistik dominan hukum Islam. Oleh karenanya, syariat Islam dengan pelbagai bagiannya telah memposisikan dirinya sebagai sesuatu yang dapat dipikirkan (thinktable) bukan hal yang tidak dapat dipikirkan (unthinktable), sebagaimana yang dikhawatirkan Ishom. Inilah agaknya makna yang dimaksud bahwa “Al-Islâm shâlih li kulli zamân wa makân” (Islam akan tetap relevan pada setiap zaman dan kondisi). Dengan demikian, keengganan formalisasi syariat Islam dengan dalih benturan budaya lokal, dalam pandangan doktrin hukum Islam, sama sekali tidak dapat menjadi alasan.

Mencermati kenyataan di atas, maka ide rekulturisasi syariat Islam, yakni menyelaraskan ruh syariat Islam dengan budaya lokal, adalah hal yang cukup kompromistis. Dengan begitu kendala kultur yang menghadang formalisasi syariat Islam menjadi tidak relevan lagi. Tinggal kita menunggu kemauan politik (political will) dari para elite di parlemen untuk merealisasikannya. Persoalannya, maukah mereka memahami ? Wallâhu a’lam bi al-Shawâb.

Sumber: Media Indonesia 2001

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Problem Yuridis RUU Syariah

Problem Yuridis RUU Syariah

Rancangan Undang-Undang Perbankan Syariah tampaknya masih menyisakan ketimpangan mulai dari aspek filosofis, sosiologis, politis, hingga praktis. Itulah simpul-simpul yang dapat diurai dalam diskusi para guru besar, pakar, dan praktisi hukum ekonomi syariah yang digelar Fakultas Syariah dan Hukum UIN Jakarta dan Himpunan Ilmuwan Sarjana Syariah se-Indonesia (HISSI) beberapa waktu lalu di Jakarta.

Diskusi terbatas ini menyoal secara tajam beberapa poin krusial menyangkut eksistensi nomenklatur ilmu ekonomi Syariah dan kompetensi institusi Peradilan Agama. Draf terakhir yang setelah mengalami pelbagai revisi menunjukkan adanya bias kepentingan pragmatis dan inkonsistensi bahkan kerancuan dari sisi aturan main pembentukan perundang-undangan.

Entah apa yang menyebabkan itu terjadi. Namun, patut diduga pemerintah sebagai penyusun draf tidak sepenuhnya memahami tentang substansi dan konsep ekonomi Islam. Selain itu, ada semacam kegamangan yang menghinggapi pemerintah terhadap profesionalitas dan integritas para yuris Muslim di negeri ini.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Religious orthodoxy and the blasphemy law

Ahmad Najib Burhani , Jakarta | Thu, 03/18/2010 10:00 AM | Opinion

Monday, March 1, 2010

A Secular Age

Charles Taylor

A Secular Age

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007, 874pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674026766

Reviewed by Michael L. Morgan, Indiana University


This is a very important book and quite an extraordinary one. Some years ago, a colleague of mine began a review with a sentence that I have always wanted to use myself: "if I had written this book, I would die a happy man." The sentiment expressed by this sentence, that the book being reviewed has about it a kind of greatness and worth such that authoring it could easily count as the culmination of a fully worthwhile life, is one that I admit to feeling about Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age. Taylor of course is well-known for his books on psychological explanation, Hegel, communitarian political philosophy, ethics and moral philosophy, and much else. Arguably he is one of the most influential English- language philosophers of the past half century. The scope of his thought is impressive -- history, political theory, ethics and moral philosophy, art, epistemology, and religion. But more to the point, it is the special way in which Taylor has bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy that is important and the way that in the course of bridging that gap he has shaped an historically rich and philosophically powerful conception of the modern identity and its social and cultural matrices.

The current work is a much-expanded version of Taylor's Gifford Lectures and a natural successor to his earlier book Sources of the Self. In that book, Taylor identified the major features of our moral-political-religious identity in the Western world and showed how those features developed and crystallized out of various historical processes. He also framed the demands of such an identity broadly in terms of what he there called "moral sources" in order to display various modern options for what empowers and inspires our moral sensibilities. I am convinced, moreover, that in that work Taylor ultimately endorses the ways in which a religious moral source can and should be called upon to satisfy our needs as moral and political selves in the modern world. In the end, that is, Sources of the Self is both an exploration of who we are as modern selves and an apology for an ethics that refers to transcendence and is religious, and specifically Christian in spirit.

But the focus of Sources of the Self is ethical and political, even if its conclusions, as I read it, are spiritual and religious, even if, that is, it argues that only a transcendent moral source is sufficient to inspire and empower the moral order that we in fact occupy. This is where A Secular Age constitutes a supplement to the earlier work. In the new book Taylor explores the religious -- and specifically the Christian -- character of our age and the various options available to believers and non-believers in our time. Moreover, not only does he provide a narrative of how these options arose and developed, from 1500 to the present, but he also examines the challenges they face and the dialectical ways in which these options are related to their cultural and political context, our needs and values, and one another. In the course of this account, furthermore, Taylor occasionally identifies his own proclivities and commitments, his own receptivity to transcendence and engagement with the historical, cultural, and political challenges we all face. Along the way, of course, we are introduced to a variety of ideal types of religious and non-religious ways of life, but this is no disinterested scholarly inquiry, no disengaged charting of territory or classification. It is rather an elaborate and committed mapping of territory for inhabitants by a co-inhabitant and a restrained eulogy to a particular domicile by one who occupies it. A Secular Age is a philosophical paean to one form of Christian moral and political life.

A number of things make Taylor's book remarkable. First, it addresses what is perhaps the major problematic of philosophy, ethics, and religion of the past century and a half. This is the problem of the content and foundations of moral value and all that such value involves, the problem that can be taken to be one of the issues addressed by Nietzsche's famous claim that God is dead. In the wake of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard, what is the most compelling account of what makes life valuable and what is the normative status of this way of life? What is it that grounds our sense of obligation, that inspires us to affirm and commit our lives to certain values, and that empowers or motivates us to realize such commitments? As Taylor suggests, after the Enlightenment and the 18th century, the most attractive solutions to this question lie in nature, as a form of natural sympathy or set of natural desires or interests, or in our sense of human dignity grounded in our rational agency, or in some kind of transcendence. The problem of Taylor's recent works, the present book included, is this set of challenges and the way it has implications for our sense of what is worthwhile or valuable in human life, what matters to us, and why. As we look back on the past century of philosophy, we can read the work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, Davidson, Williams, Rawls, Habermas, Putnam, Cavell and a host of others as contributions to this problematic. Taylor sees this issue, and his work, importantly inspired by Hegel and Foucault among so many, is just such a contribution.

Second, what distinguishes Taylor's recent books, as it does the work of Alasdair MacIntyre ever since After Virtue, is the way it lacks any kind of provinciality. In short, it is not biased against a religious response to this problematic. Indeed, it is unabashedly willing to defend a religious solution or a religious commitment, and a Christian one, albeit a nuanced and distinctive one. To be sure, other analytic philosophers have recently taken on rather strong Christian commitments but largely within the framework of a kind of natural theology. What distinguishes Taylor and MacIntyre is that both take on Christian commitments within the framework of a moral order or within the larger question of what might be called a hermeneutics of human life and its evaluative richness.

Third, Taylor's work is informed and nuanced, pluralist, deep, open, and yet critical. He frames questions in such a way that they are highly abstract and yet richly concrete, and his discussion of positions and issues is broad and yet filled with detail. What marks Taylor's style, as a philosopher, is that he sets out novel and wide conceptual frameworks and yet illustrates them with encounters that are detailed and subtle. This is why I say that Taylor is indebted to predecessors like Hegel and Foucault, both of whose work is narrative, exploratory, and yet conceptual, all at once. In today's vocabulary, I suppose, we might call his work genealogical, but perhaps it is clearer simply to describe it as conceptually articulate and yet historically full, narrative and dialectical. If this is what we mean by genealogical, then Taylor's work is that.

It is time to say something about the plot of the book. Although it is divided into five parts and twenty chapters, I think that we can best understand the book as having two parts, a diachronic or narrative one and a dialectical or synchronic one. In the first four parts and fourteen chapters, Taylor charts the historical development that led to the main option that makes our secular age possible, what he calls "exclusive humanism," and then describes its diverse legacy in the 19th century to our own day. In the last part and final six chapters, he uses these results in order to explore several current options of belief and unbelief in their interrelations and especially in terms of how they deal with suffering and evil, the bodily and the sexual, violence and destruction, the mundane and the variety of ordinary life.

Taylor's historical narrative is marked by several features. First, it is not a history of doctrines or theories. Rather it is a history of the background conditions that made various doctrinal and practical ways of life possible and hence is framed as a history of lived experience, what Taylor calls the "social imaginaries" of lived experience, or what might be called a history of sensibilities or worldviews, of the self-understandings of our social existence (146, 171-174). Second, Taylor's account avoids "homogenizing" these social imaginaries of experience and tries to appreciate their complexity. Third, Taylor emphasizes that one of the most important shifts in these background frameworks as lived, these social imaginaries, is when they cease to be oriented around elites and become explicitly open to all human beings. They become the frameworks of belief and life for whole societies. Fourth, time and again Taylor eschews what he calls "subtraction stories," which narrate the development of secularity as the formulation of a view that emerges by subtracting one or more features of transcendence from the view and thereby freeing us from illusions or limitations that confine and distort who we are. His own approach seeks to show how various forms of belief and unbelief interact with their social and religious context and with one another in ways that are constantly giving rise to new forms of belief and unbelief. Taylor's story does not treat the history of Christianity in the West as a story, perhaps indebted to Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, from darkness to light, from infantile piety to an adult form of secular humanism, one in which a conception of a morally ordered society under divine governance realizes a more perfect state when its references to transcendence are subtracted from it (see 22, 91, 255, 573). Finally, Taylor explicitly confines his account to a history of secularism as it arises within the life of Christendom in the West. Although he does, on a few occasions, refer to Islam and Judaism, the book is an account of the current age in the life of Christianity in the world of North Atlantic civilizations. By and large, the theologians, texts, authors, philosophers, political figures, poets, and others whom he discusses are Christian or are figures whose lives and work can be understood within the context of Christian culture in the West. Taylor does say that analogous accounts could be given for secularity within other religious worlds; he does not indicate or suggest how these other accounts might be similar to or different from his own.

To sketch the main features of Taylor's historical narrative is not a simple task, I think, in part because of the complexity of the story that Taylor tells and in part because of the terminology he uses. Taylor explores a myriad of themes in analysis that begin in one place, only to pick up the same theme on several different occasions, weaving in an intermittent way patterns that gain in depth and clarity only as the book goes on. The book is filled too with digressions, or perhaps it is more precise to say that its structure is not linear but rather investigative and exploratory. Taylor bridles against simple, straightforward analyses or narratives, and the result is that it is very hard to identify the main lines of his story or even to summarize the development of its main themes and ideas. This complexity, then, poses one sort of problem for any attempt to summarize the book's content.

Years ago, when Taylor was working on Sources of the Self, he and I had lunch together in Montreal, and he tried to explain to me the conceptual apparatus that he was developing for discussing the ethical and moral realities that he discusses in that book. I remember vividly how challenging he thought it was to formulate and then define terms and concepts that were embracing enough and sufficiently unbiased for the task. In A Secular Age one senses the same kind of struggle going on, especially when Taylor tries to clarify what he means by secularization, what he takes to be the object of his narrative and his account, and the kind of life and the kind of experience he takes to be the most revealing setting in which the crucial features of a person's lived experience are disclosed. The latter he calls "fullness," but this term is obscured as much as clarified by its commonness.

Taylor talks often about experiencing fullness and how it is in such an experience that the character of an age's ideals and their capacity to inspire and empower a person are revealed. "Fullness" characterizes a momentary experience when what counts most about a way of life and a conception of what matters in life is conveyed to the agent in a particularly complete and perfect way (see 600-601). Hence, for a believer, Taylor says, fullness is experienced as received, while for non-believers, especially after the 18th century, fullness is experienced as grounded or empowered by something that lies within us, say reason or certain forms of desire (see, e.g., 9). Moreover, although there comes a time when such ideals of life are conceived of as available to every Christian, still they may be best articulated by members of an elite -- by statesmen or philosophers or saints or poets -- because they are most capable of expressing the experience of such fullness in a way that reveals its dimensions and its character and because they are most likely to have done so. For this reason, Taylor's story not only refers to social and political practices and events, and to psychological responses and habits, but also to its main illustrative expositors, so to speak, who are philosophers, novelists, poets, the authors of confessional literature, and such, for they are the people who have left us literary evidence of what they experienced at moments when they lived in a moment of fullness and then sought to articulate its meaning and character. I mention all of this not to try to clarify what Taylor means by "fullness" or to register qualms about the term or its use. My point is that Taylor's narrative is made all the more complex by the fact that he is trying to deal with a subject matter that is not that easy to conceptualize and in ways that are also not that easy to clarify. He develops and employs a terminology, and he has to, at least as a kind of shorthand, but it may be that the meaning of his vocabulary only becomes clearer and more accessible as the book goes on and that the terms may themselves have a good deal of ambiguity or nuance. The terms he uses are by and large an embedded vocabulary that is hard to disengage from the particular contexts in which it is used.

With this caveat in place, let me try to outline the story that Taylor tells. How do we get from a closed, hierarchical order governed by the divine, an enchanted world inhabited by demons, forces, magic and so forth and the home of what Taylor calls the "porous" self, to a disenchanted, mechanistic world inhabited by the disengaged or " buffered" self? How does the world change from one in which the power of fullness lies outside of us and nature to one in which that power lies within us, from a world organized around "higher times" to one in which time is largely homogeneous and empty? And then how does this latter world become our own, and when it does, what opportunities become available for ways of experiencing that world and living in it?

According to Taylor, the modern, secular world emerges when an internal and self-sufficient humanism becomes available as a real opportunity, a humanism with no goal other than some form of human flourishing. Resources for such a self-sufficient or, (as Taylor calls it) an exclusive humanism, become available at least in the 16th and 17th centuries -- with the rise of the new science and all it implies with a new sense of the self, its depths and its status as disengaged with the world as an observer, analyst, and critic, and with a new appreciation for ordinary life and the mundane. These changes were all guided by a Reform spirit in Christianity, of which the Reformation was a high point insofar as it focused on dissolving the gap between elite and popular piety. But such a humanism itself only begins to emerge in the Enlightenment and to come of age in the 19th century. When it does, this exclusive humanism is marked by agency that is active and constructive and by a conception of social order that is grounded in science, art, and morality. What occurs is a shift from finding our place in the cosmos to constructing our position in the universe (114). In both there is order, but in the former the order is God-given and permanent, while in the latter the order is shaped by human effort to remake human life and transform society (125).

Taylor gives priority of place to the natural law tradition, the rise of neo-Stoicism, and the way in which the Cartesian revolution provided the notion of disengaged agency that could seek to transform society according to an ideal of order that is grounded in divine providence. Lipsius, the creator of neo-Stoicism, was committed to the human capacity to unify society through active intervention in public, political, and military affairs (117-118). He had advice for absolute sovereigns whose goal was political peace and security in the face of conflict and war. Exclusive humanism developed out of this combination of neo-Stoicism, the natural law tradition, and the contract tradition of Grotius and Locke (130). In the wake of the Cartesian revolution, society came to be viewed as a malleable substance that could be shaped by the human imposition of ideal form. That ideal was an ideal of moral order, first conceived as a harmony of interests and then as security for individual rights and the creation of freedom, and finally as a network of mutual benefit whereby individuals are organized in society in order to help one another (see 171). In this development, the American Revolution was a watershed, for it heralded the coming of a nation constituted by human agency without a real vertical grounding in a transcendent source.

Roughly speaking, exclusive humanism is a development of the 18th and 19th centuries. But it was anticipated by developments of the late 16th and 17th centuries. What, then, formed the transition to it? Taylor's answer is providential Deism. It is this intermediate stage that made exclusive humanism a live option. It was a form of natural religion that conceived of the world as an impersonal order that focused on mutual benefit and was designed by God (221). What distinguishes Deism are a number of shifts: one serves God in no other way than by serving humankind; understanding nature and living in it are projects governed by reason; any sense of mystery and miracle diminishes (222-224). Taylor surveys many reasons for such changes and the narrowing of religiosity to morality -- historical, cultural, and political reasons. But the crucial point is that in Deism the divine or transcendent orientation of Christian life is severely attenuated, leaving Christianity one step away from an immanent humanism. In Deism, God is the overseer of an impersonal natural order, is nearly dispensable, and, as Taylor puts it, in Deism man's only vocation is human flourishing (242-243). It is but a short step to the kind of humanism that Taylor associates with Kant, Bentham, and Mill.

Exclusive humanism invokes a moral order whose ontic commitment, as Taylor calls it, is wholly intra-human; it carries no reference to transcendence (256). According to it, we are motivated either by enlightenment or by a sense of natural sympathy, and our aim is benevolence. It is one of the special achievements of such humanism that it discloses these new, anthropocentric moral sources by which we are motivated and empowered to accomplish mutual benefit (257). It is the province of the buffered self, disengaged and the locus of dignity, freedom, discipline, and a sense of human capability (262).

Hence, by the early 19th century, exclusive humanism developed as an alternative to Christian faith in a personal God and an order of miracles and mystery. It had positive and negative features, giving rise to a sense of pride and self-worth but also to a feeling of being limited by this world and of being alienated from something valuable and decisive. Out of this tension there arose a sense of malaise in a world that seemed empty and barren. And from this malaise sprang a host of further developments in belief and unbelief -- Taylor calls this the nova effect -- and finally, during the twentieth century, a proliferation of the fractured worlds of an intellectual elite to whole societies (299). The 19th and 20th centuries, then, are scenes of instability and uncertainty, for poets and philosophers, and eventually for whole peoples and societies, who experience ennui and a pervasive meaninglessness. Taylor surveys the many dimensions of such changes and the proliferation of modes of unbelief and responses to them in the 19th century; he features, among others, literary figures, artists, and poets whose work expresses the melancholy and despair that grip the age. It is a time of unbelief for some and of novel ontic commitments, albeit not religious ones, for others, a time of wonder, play, mystery, and even horror (374-376). It is this period that provides us now with our possibilities for belief and the shape or shapelessness of our world.

Of special importance for understanding the current situation are the changes associated with the 1960s, the growth of widespread "expressive" individualism as a social movement, and changes in the conception of agency and the good (Chapter 13, "The Age of Authenticity"). With the return of a vital youth culture and the development of a consumer society, together with a host of other social and economic changes, this new culture recovers in its own way trends that Taylor associates with Romanticism but now as a mass movement (and not the special province of an artistic and literary elite) with its focus on fashion, style, external display, the protection of rights, and much more. Of all of this, Taylor asks: where in the culture of expressive individualism is the sacred? (486) To answer this very difficult question Taylor explores a whole variety of modalities of contemporary culture, their roots in the previous two centuries, their relationship to traditional religious practices and commitments. He concludes that in some ways post-1960s generations are deeply alienated from traditional forms of Christian faith in the West, often opposing such forms and often recovering them but only in rigid, exaggerated ways. But one should not see the past fifty years, pure and simply, as a time of the breakdown of a sense of the sacred. Rather new forms of spirituality have developed, new senses of the sacred set in new languages (507). There have emerged new struggles for wholeness and spiritual health, new paths to what Taylor has called all along "fullness." The upshot is a tension in our day of the rejection of traditional religious life in favor of individualism and pluralism and the affirmation of forms of it, between those who affirm traditional authority and those who reject it (510), those who are driven to new forms of self-sufficiency. Furthermore, what marks our spiritual landscape is great diversity and the proliferation of middle ways, between these two poles, of ways of unbelief and ways of belief. This spells a decline in Christendom perhaps, but not a decline in Christianity, conceived in broad and nuanced terms. Taylor calls this a diffusive Christianity, a believing without belonging (518-519). What has been lost is not the religious motivation; rather it is a commitment to traditional belief and practice. There has been a decline not in religious aspiration and its prominence but rather in the unchallengeable status of belief (530). We are in a new age of religious searching. At a time when morality seems to be a matter of utility, rationality, and freedom, it may be hard to see why anyone feels the need to ground morality in something higher, in divine transcendence, but, Taylor argues, religious answers to the question of life's meaning are still available, and, to some, such answers are desirable (591-592).

This sketch is culled largely from Parts I-IV (Chapters 1-14) of A Secular Age. As Taylor puts it at the beginning of Chapter 15, these earlier chapters tell the story of how we arrived at the question. Why is it so hard to believe in God in the modern West, when in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to believe? (539) The reader should be warned, however, that the story is not an easy read. Taylor as a narrator seems to be constantly constrained by a resistance to the linear and the simplistic; at times his forward movement occurs almost under duress. For every step forward in his story, Taylor provides dozens of side-trips or repetitions of strands of the story from new points of view, or explorations of positions, figures, responses, and conditions from alternative perspectives. We might better appreciate these chapters of the book if we see them as arguments for complexity and nuance, with the story of the emergence and diversification of exclusive humanism embedded within them. Indeed, here is where the richness of the book occurs, and it is something that no review or report could possibly convey. Neither is it an uncontroversial story nor are its overarching arguments, its various digressions, its subplots and sub-subplots uncontroversial. If we are persuaded, however, it is a story that provides the resources for an analysis of the contemporary West.

Part V (Chapters 15-20) gives an account of the "spiritual shape of the present age." Here Taylor draws upon the terminology, conceptual apparatus, and results of the earlier chapters in order to conduct a kind of structural-dialectical analysis of the complexity of our current age, a time in which a host of spiritual and anti-spiritual options for Christians interact and vie with one another and with the historical context of the age. The dramatis personae who have been introduced earlier -- disenchantment, the porous and buffered selves, the modern moral order, exclusive humanism, higher time and secular time, the paleo-, neo-, and post-Durkheimian dispensations, et al. -- and a number of new players (for example, the "immanent frame," the "ancien regime" and the "closed world structures," and an array of cross pressures) now come on stage in a series of dramatic engagements, like a repertoire company performing a variety show. In an earlier episode, for example, these players show how we live today in an "immanent frame" that is disenchanted and humanistic. This frame is the sensed context in which we live and develop our beliefs. It is a Wittgensteinian picture, a background for our thinking that we most often take for granted but in which we can at times feel the pull of beliefs in one direction or another (548-549). The players show that this immanent frame need not require that a sense of the sacred be rejected. They then go on to ask how this frame can remain open (544-545), even if today many features of it push us toward closure. After numerous such episodes, at the very end, Taylor as impresario allows himself to call on stage several exemplars of the kind of Christian faith that Taylor himself finds most compelling -- Ivan Illich, Charles Peguy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins -- and in his farewell to the reader, to celebrate the future as a time of opportunity and not one of despair.

One of the central themes that recurs in these last chapters, having been introduced earlier, concerns the ways in which belief and unbelief cope with a cluster of realities -- ordinary life, the body, sexuality, violence, suffering, pain, evil, and such. If these realities are intended to be grouped together, it is nonetheless difficult to grasp how the category they constitute should be defined. What is the polarity of which these realities are intended to occupy one pole? Is it the opposition between the abstract and the concrete? Or that between the mental and the physical? Or between the sacred and the profane? Or the transcendent and the immanent? Or eternity and time? Between spiritual transformation and a wholly worldly human flourishing? In a sense, the polarity is none of these in any narrow way; it is all of them in a broad sense.

Taylor argues that the salient feature of Western societies is not a decline in religious belief and practice; it is rather the plurality of forms of belief and unbelief and their fragile or transitory status. We live in a world of what he calls "cross pressures" where the old beliefs and views are destabilized and new ones have formed and especially where middle positions take shape or are transformed (595). Novel forms of spiritual life take shape between orthodox religiosity and atheistic materialism and as a result of these cross pressures. The latter give rise to various dilemmas which we face in various ways. The realities to which I refer above are a cluster that forms one side of these cross pressures and one pole of such dilemmas (see especially Chapters 17 and 18). Often Christianity has gone through stages or taken up views that involve what Taylor calls "excarnation," a shift from taking seriously the bodily, the sexual, the physical, and such to giving priority of place to what lies in the head, e.g., reason or psychological well-being or spiritual transformation. But at critical moments there emerged forms of belief and unbelief that sought to recover the sense of the bodily and its importance; Taylor frequently cites the case of Schiller and his notion of "play" as well as more extreme figures from the Romantics and Nietzsche to Bataille (see 609-617). There are a host of more traditional forms of belief and unbelief, moreover, that also seek to cope with these realities.

The aspiration to fullness or wholeness includes the aspiration to rescue or rehabilitate the bodily and the domain of natural, ordinary desires (618). A full human life must somehow deal with our incarnate status, whether by affirming it, denying its significance, or in some middle way. As Taylor shows, the domain of the physical and ordinary makes a variety of demands upon moral positions and upon Christianity, and both ethics and religion have sought to cope with these challenges and to incorporate the bodily, the sexual, and the ordinary in a variety of ways. Taylor's account amounts to his particular way of articulating what is well-known and occasionally to his framing a widely-appreciated set of issues in a novel way or to calling attention to what is not all that frequently discussed. The classical model for this discussion is Platonic, for the category to which Taylor is here calling attention can be initially understood as a set of variations on Plato's portrayal of life in the world of everyday experience, the world of "becoming," of change and instability. Hence, the challenges that are posed for religion and ethics, insofar as they seek fullness and perfection, are the challenges of time and history, of the physical and mundane, of desire and pain and erotic love, of injury, pain, violence, and suffering, and much else along these lines, including their natural fulfillments as well as fragile character. Taylor is as interested in health and human flourishing as he is in sickness and evil intention.

In Chapter 17 Taylor uses this set of realities and the problems it poses for belief and unbelief in order to map some positions that are available today. They are used, for example, by non-believers in critiques of Christianity. One critique is Romantic; it charges Christianity with trying to escape the limitations of our finite human condition. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum, Taylor points out that this effort smacks of "changing the subject," insofar as it chooses to fulfill human life by aiming to transcend it altogether. "Are we not forsaking human excellence and striving after some alien life-form?" (626) But there is

another charge against the aspiration to transcend, not just that it is futile and self-defeating, but that it actually damages us, unfits us for the pursuit of human fulfillment . . . . By inducing in us hate and disgust at our ordinary human desires and neediness . . . a repulsion at our limitations which poisons the joy we might otherwise feel in the satisfactions of human life as it is. (626)

Taylor notes that this charge is especially made against Christianity, not only by Nussbaum but before her by thinkers such as Voltaire and Nietzsche. But Taylor calls our attention to this argument. First, it fails to appreciate how often and how importantly Christianity itself demanded a return to the ordinary and the "rediscovery and affirmation of important human goods" (628). What he is calling attention to is the way that in religious and literary, as well as social, contexts there has been in modernity a renewed appreciation of everyday (even flawed) relationships, conduct, and experiences, from love to estrangement, from animosity to mutual concern. In short, no form of transformation is acceptable that eschews what is human in our lives, and not all forms of transcendence are completely valuable; it is not all that clear what forms of transcendence are desirable and what forms are not, nor can we be certain at all times about what in human life ought to be transcended and what should not (630). There is too much complexity in sexual love, violence, and even suffering for categorical, completely confident judgments. In the end, Taylor encourages us to worry about crediting too seriously the distinction between the immanent and the transcendent as they occur in this kind of critique of Christianity (632).

As I see it, however, there is another way to make this kind of case against critics like Nussbaum and Nietzsche, not because no clear line divides the immanent from the transcendent, but because even when there is such a line, it may not be possible to cross it. One might be inclined to believe that there is a kind of violence, suffering, or evil that is so extreme, so radical, that it is always worth transcending although in some sense it is never possible to do so. Such a radical evil, to be taken seriously, must be acknowledged for what it is -- wholly evil, such that transcending it would risk treating it as an opportunity or motivation for bettering oneself through escape. The only alternative, then, would be to oppose it, to resist it, leaving open how that might be done in a way that does not risk turning the evil itself into a good or succumbing to it.

If one form of Christianity sought to transcend the body, suffering, violence, and evil, another form, more humanistic, failed to appreciate the depth and seriousness of the latter. It was criticized too, but this time not by a humanistic responsibility to the everyday but rather, on the one hand, by those who celebrated violence, aggression, and desire to inflict suffering -- once again, it is Nietzsche who comes to Taylor's mind (634-635) -- and, on the other, by those who believe that "this humanism tends to hide from itself how great the conflict is between the different things we value" and "artificially removes the tragedy, the wrenching choices between incompatibles, the dilemmas, which are inseparable from human life" (635); here it is Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams whom Taylor mentions. For both such positions, an "untroubled harmony" is "unattainable" and "even a kind of culpable weakness" (635). Here too, however, Taylor finds the critique at times unjustified and yet also, in other cases, wholly appropriate. But oddly enough it is the very same humanism that charges Christianity with an unacceptable disregard of the human that is itself now charged with too compromised a harmony with it.

Taylor's analysis does not end here, but it is sufficient for us to see the point of his dialectical, ramified exploration of positions: it is to demonstrate that the map of possibilities for belief and unbelief in our age is not a simple one, not even one of basic oppositions. Instead what is needed, as he himself says, is a "new, more nuanced map of the ideological terrain" (626), and it is to further that task that the remainder of Chapters 17 and 18 is designed. It is a project organized around what he calls the "maximal demand," to examine "how to define our highest spiritual or 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). And the ultimate ground of this demand, he claims, is our aspiration to wholeness. To be sure, Taylor admits that not all see this aspiration in the same terms or in the same way; Plato and Aristotle may both adhere to it and yet with very different interpretations. But he does claim that it is central to a Christianity whose central affirmation is the Incarnation of the divine in the human. This is a very Hegelian commitment on Taylor's part, and there is little surprise in his making it.

Moreover, embedded in the belief in the Incarnation is a commitment to the union of the sacred and the profane, the infinite and the finite, that does show how profoundly Christian Taylor's analysis is. One need only note that Judaism, for all its own commitment to some kind of unity in nature and society, is not grounded in the affirmation of a similar unity of the divine and the human. For Judaism, when the infinite encounters the finite in moments of revelation, it is crucial that both retain their utter independence and that the covenant between them is dialectically rich but also respects their fundamental difference. Can the same be said of the ideals of eternity and the realities of history, of redemption and human fulfillment? Or is the distinction between transcendence and immanence, fundamentally, so different for Judaism that the maximal demand need be met but only in a very different way than it must in Christianity?

I raise these questions only to suggest something that I think Taylor would himself accept, that his story of secularization in the Christian West has its peculiar, distinctive features that may influence but might not carry over without alteration to a story about secularization and Jewish life in the West or secularization and Islam in the West -- and also in the East. That is, rich and suggestive as it is, Taylor's narrative and his analysis is by no means the end of the story of religion and Western culture. Indeed, I think that he is careful never to suggest that, even if his story were completed in all its details, it would be such a comprehensive picture. But Taylor's story and his analysis do raise fundamental and extremely important questions that deserve to be addressed and they do so in provocative and challenging ways. I have tried to say enough about the content of A Secular Age to show why this is so; I leave detailed criticism to the reader. It is a book that no one interested in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and art in Western society and culture can afford to neglect.

Retrieved from: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13905

Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

Charles Taylor examines our attempts to fill the God-shaped hole left by the death of belief in his weighty tome A Secular Age, says Stuart Jeffries

Stuart Jeffrie
The Guardian, Saturday 8 December 2007

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
874pp, Harvard, £25.95

In March this year, Charles Taylor joined Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn as a winner of the Templeton prize for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities. Not only did the award make the professor emeritus of philosophy at Montreal's McGill University nearly £800,000 richer, it also brought him into the crosshairs of Richard Dawkins who, in his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, argued that the Templeton involved "a very large sum of money given [...] usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion". The implication was that any professor prepared to have their palm thus greased was intellectually dishonest.

Now comes Taylor's thumping great volume (weighing in at 1.3 kilos to The God Delusion's 730g) in which he traces the story of faith's decline and of how learned despisers of religion such as Dawkins became not only possible but popular. It has one big question. "Why," asks Taylor at the outset, "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?" In 1500, our ancestors thought the natural world testified to divine purpose. Floods, plagues, periods of fertility and flourishing were seen as acts of God. Now "acts of God" is a dead metaphor used by lawyers. How did that happen? In the following 800-plus pages he tries to provide an answer that only a fool would deride as intellectually dishonest.

The Templeton guys probably really like A Secular Age. True, it hardly amounts to research into spiritual realities (whatever that means), but Taylor hints obligingly at a time in which secularism's "hegemony of the mainstream master narrative" could be over (a great elucidator of Hegel, Taylor doesn't so much turn a phrase as let it curdle in philosophical jargon). They will also no doubt like the fact that Taylor is highly critical of so-called "subtraction stories", those Whig versions of secularism's history, whereby human nature steadily casts off its shackles of ignorance and superstition, finally emerging from a Bastille of the mind into the bright morning of truth.

Taylor's account is much more complicated. There is chronology, but hardly a straightforward narrative that might explain why the only recent bestseller about religion was written by a vituperative atheist. One might think that the cumulative impact of the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment and myriad scientific revolutions was to make it possible to think about the material world without reference to any transcendent power (Taylor calls this the "immanent frame"), but that is not the whole story. He argues that the west has been changed by what he calls a "nova effect": once a humanistic alternative to the transcendent frame established itself, it spawned an ever-widening variety of moral and spiritual positions, in the professor's words, "across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond".

Let's stay with the thinkable. What's especially compelling about Taylor's, admittedly sometimes long-winded, book is his charge that cracks in Christianity provided places where secularism's weeds flourished. In this he's not just talking about the reformation, but, for example, the movement called deism, prominent in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, France and America, which rejected the theistic position (common in Judaism, Islam and much Christianity) that relied on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of others. Instead, deism drew the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience. Deism, of course, for some became a way-station from theism to atheism, but not for all.

From deism, Taylor shifts focus to what he calls the west's current age of authenticity. By this he means an individualistic era in which people are encouraged to find their own way or do their own thing. The idea that one had to use one's own reason and experience to find God instilled a sense of intellectual autonomy that led some to abandon God altogether. "As a result," writes Taylor, "the nova effect has been intensified. We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."

Paradoxically, that gallop leads some of us back to communal worship and to yearn for something more than the self-sufficient power of reason. Some long for ultimate meaning, and that longing may end with God. God, Taylor tells us, is always breaking in, stepping through the immanent frame of secularism. But when God makes his appearance, Taylor finds, he sounds just like Peggy Lee, singing "Is That All There Is?". Secularism, he charges, has left us leading hollow, atomised lives, devoid of what he (to my mind bafflingly) calls "fullness". To be sure, Taylor allows that some atheists find "fullness", by which he may mean human dignity and meaning, in the absence of a comprehensible God. Camus, for instance, suggests in his writings that this sense of humans facing a meaningless, hostile universe and rising to the challenge of devising our own rules of life can be inspiring. It may even serve to fill the God-shaped hole Taylor sometimes implies lies in the atheist's breast.

He is at his best when finding God breaking into art, eloquently analysing the intimations of transcendence in Wordsworth's poetry and Wagner's music and why those two artists might be so important in our increasingly godless times. Intriguingly, he argues too that there are certain works of art - Dante, Bach, Chartres cathedral - "whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge to the unbeliever is to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment." But the unbeliever needn't respond to that challenge: even secularists, if we have learned anything from Taylor's book, must realise that we are haunted by the ghost of God. As a result, we are capable of responding in a theistic register to Bach, Dante and Chartres without (necessarily) believing in God.

On such occasions, Taylor is too shrill in insisting on secularism's purported impoverishment of sensibility. It recalls Keats's accusation that Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining it. In Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow, the zoologist retorted that science does not destroy, but rather discovers poetry in the patterns and laws of nature. It is at least arguable that godless science is enchanting rather than disenchanting.

What's more, the godless may not be in the sometimes glum state Taylor fears. He should have attended more closely to Peggy Lee. She didn't only ask "is that all there is?". She also answered her own question, singing "if that's all there is, then let's keep dancing". It is not a song lamenting a lack of God or ultimate meaning. Instead, it was an indomitable, scornful, humanistic shrug at a world abandoned by God and filled with other disappointments. It wouldn't have won Peggy Lee the Templeton prize, true; but, if it isn't quite atheistic, then it's in tune with the secular age that Taylor diagnoses, for the most part, well.

Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/dec/08/society1/print

The Godless Delusion

The New York Times



December 16, 2007

The Godless Delusion

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A SECULAR AGE

By Charles Taylor.

874 pp. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $39.95.

We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”

Charles Taylor would prefer that we feast upon the 874 pages of his new book “A Secular Age,” which offers musings and perceptions from every field of knowledge except knowledge of God, which he leaves off the menu. Taylor’s quarrel is with secularism — the idea that as modernity, science and democracy have advanced, concern with God and spirituality has retreated to the margins of life. Calling this thesis “very unconvincing,” Taylor seeks to prove that God is still very much present in the world, if only we look at the right places and allow the mind to open itself to moral inquiry and aesthetic sensibility rather than traditional theology as the gateway to religion.

Taylor, an emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University, is the author of “Hegel” (1975) and “Sources of the Self” (1989) and the winner of this year’s prestigious Templeton Prize, awarded for advancement and research of spiritual matters. A Roman Catholic who is convinced that life lacks meaning without belief in God, Taylor is also a communitarian who questions the value of an individualism supposedly indifferent to the concerns of the larger society. He commands wide admiration for his ecumenical attitude toward world religions, his favorable view of identity politics and his commitment to the idea of human beings as contesting agents, always situated in conflict and thereby deserving of rights. He also appeals to postmodernist thinkers who trust less in the power of philosophy to prove the existence of truth than in the power of language to persuade us of the possibility of belief.

Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?

In “A Secular Age,” Taylor answers with a resounding no. He argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “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.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”

Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.

Taylor’s case for the moral authority of “self-sufficient reason” may claim too much for mind and will. Descartes could scarcely break free from the Calvinist conviction that the will, rather than exercising sovereign control over the body, remained in bondage to the sins of the flesh. Freud saw religion as an illusion born of the need to deny death; and James gave us the right to believe, but not necessarily the reasons for it. The most Taylor succeeds in arguing is that secularization did not kill off religion, since the depths of humanism have survived as spiritual values.

Taylor’s deconstruction of the death-of-God thesis rests on his conviction that “the arguments from natural science to Godlessness are not all that convincing.” He has no patience with atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who argue that science, particularly the theory of evolution, has consigned religion to the ash heap of history. Taylor, in contrast, sees science as reinforcing religion, since God is implicated in a social existence where the contemplation of meaning and order suggests “something divine in us.” For Taylor, belief is not what science finds but what religion hopes for. Yet, in the larger perspective of intellectual history, the validity of belief may turn less on the clash of science and religion than on a concept of a deity in all its paradoxes. “An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that his intentions shall be understood by his creatures,” Nietzsche wrote, “could he be a God of goodness?” But Taylor seems uninterested in explaining the ways of God, and he argues that religion needs no justification on the basis of its good works while secularization, which some thinkers argue is necessary for tolerance, endangers the religious values that may save us from the temptations of our selfish desires.

A word repeated in Taylor’s book is “disenchantment,” derived from Max Weber, who saw Enlightenment reason turning into modern rationalization as intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control. Taylor agrees that this “disenchantment of the world” leaves us with a universe that is dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by “specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart” — what Weber called the “iron cage” of modern life.

The Weberian outlook is bleak, and Taylor puts it aside to find a far more hopeful vision in the sociology of Emile Durkheim. In contrast to Weber, Durkheim saw the forms of society as containing not impersonal functions but deeply implanted sacred practices, and he saw religion rooted in the roles and rules of modern social systems resisting the chill of alienation. Whatever intellectuals may think, people value religion as providing a framework of meaning, a realm of unifying symbols and a sense of belonging. Some observers have been surprised by the resurgence of religion in recent years. “In a sense,” Taylor observes, “part of what drove the Moral Majority and motivates the Christian right in the U.S.A. is an aspiration to re-establish something of the fractured neo-Durkheimian understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God.’”

Contrary to Taylor, the American founders felt they had to deal with a young republic consisting not of one nation but of a series of contending factions. Religion, in their view, would do more to divide the country into zealous sects than to unify it under “God,” who, after several polite appearances in the Declaration of Independence, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Jefferson, in fact, subscribed to the “subtraction” theory of history that Taylor denies. “Priests,” wrote the author of the Declaration, “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.”

“A Secular Age” is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition, even if repetitious. While Taylor’s main purpose is to salvage religion from the corrosive effects of modern secularism, he would also like to see the Anglo-American world reconsider its liberal legacy. The Federalist authors taught that government was about safeguarding life, liberty and land. “The transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God,” James Madison wrote, “declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”

Taylor believes that Western liberal thought, beginning with Hobbes and Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, is on the wrong track. For some Catholics in the intellectual tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, the meaning of history is not the preservation of life but the salvation of the soul, not the right to labor and own property but the duty to abide by moral order, not the greed of the market but the grace of the cathedral. To resist the ubiquity of liberal individualism, Taylor draws on such dubious historical sources as classical republicanism, in which citizens subordinate private interest to public virtue, and the theory of public space, where citizens supposedly long gathered to discuss the issues of the day and render politics an act of conversation and dialogue. Taylor also draws upon the literature of Romanticism to demonstrate that spirit lives on in the imaginations of mind whatever the material forces of secularization. “A new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham,” he exhorts.

Some 19th-century New England Transcendentalists may have felt the presence of God in a blade of grass, but they sought to escape the Abraham who would have murdered his own son at God’s command, along with America’s own killer of innocence in the name of authority, Captain Ahab. Taylor’s effort to resurrect intellectual respect for religion is commendable without being credible. A new poetic language led Emerson to see American religion as “corpse-cold” as the sublime gave way to the mundane and the

“thingification” of life. What threatened religion was not only secularization but society itself, with its anxieties about status and lack of self-reliance. Yet Taylor looks to society for religious redemption, one possibility being “to recover a sense of the link between erotic desire and the love of God, which lies deep in the biblical traditions.” Whatever our desires, we are drawn to God. “Our access to the will of God, through his design,” Taylor writes, “is crucial to the story of the modern moral order and to the new neo-Durkheimian understanding of God’s presence among us.” Taylor assumes that we can “find a way back” to God by re-enchanting society with the mysteries of spirit and even sensuality. Since we cannot get to God by means of philosophy, Taylor sees the Deity’s “design” in the social world as we experience it in its moral and erotic dimensions. Can the same faith be trusted to history as to society? To insist that the “will of God” can be seen in history, one would have to deal with thinkers from Thucydides to Tolstoy, who saw “design” as the domination of reason by power and freedom by fate.


Emerson called society “a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” its material pleasures the very soil of secularism itself. Durkheim expected that such insatiable pleasures would be restrained by society, the role once assumed by religion. Taylor, for his part, promises an understanding of “God’s presence among us” in the fullness of ordinary life. But the belief that God inheres in life itself suggests Taylor’s Hegelianism and the dialectical fantasy that an indwelling “spirit” governs the material world. To see the sacred within the profane, to derive God from the sentiments of society, does little to relieve us of Weber’s secularized world where politics is no longer an ethical calling and religion no longer an ascetic ideal. Taylor may locate the drama of the soul in society, but the meaning and mystery of God remain as elusive as the enigma of existence and religious morality becomes little more than social convention. There are many reasons to read the profound meditations in “A Secular Age,” but waiting for God to show up is not one of them.

John Patrick Diggins teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of the forthcoming “God Is Dead! Long Live Religion” and other books.

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