Demythologizing the secular

Why do secularists so confidently assume that the Closed World imminent frame is just “the way things are” — the “obvious” and only thing to conclude?

Really, going either way, secular or religious, requires a ‘leap of faith’

James KA Smith sums up Charles Taylor’s explanation for why this is :

Because(1) What pretends to be a “discovery” of the way things are, the “obvious” unveiling of reality once we remove (subtract) myth and enchantment, is in fact a construction, a creation; in short, this wasn’t just a subtraction project.

(2) Baseline moral commitments stand behind Closed World Structure's, specifically the coming-of-age metaphor of adulthood, having the courage to resist the comforting enchantments of childhood. In short, to just “see” the closedness of the immanent frame is to be a grown-up. Secular spin, in this way, is associated with maturity: “modernity as adulthood”.

But that is a story, not neutral data, and Taylor has been contesting such self-‐ congratulatory stories all along.

Taylor is actually bent on demythologizing the supposed “naturalness” of this take (spin?), showing us “the illusion of the rational ‘obviousness’ of the closed perspective” . Such supposed obviousness is an attempt to insulate us from the “fragilization” of our secular age.

The shift to a modern, foundationalist epistemology, Taylor suggests, operates as a CWS because of how it structures knowledge; beginning with the certainty of my representations, there is a kind of concentric circle of certitude. “This can operate as a CWS because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the extreme and most fragile end of a chain of inferences; it is the most epistemically questionable”. If knowledge is knowing something “outside” my mind, the transcendent would seem to be as far away as one could get. This loads the dice against any expectation of making contact, and the whole notion becomes more and more implausible.

It comes across as an obvious discovery we make when we reflect on our perception and acquisition of knowledge.” Descartes, Locke, and Hume have finally “seen” what was there all along. But “seen from the deconstruction [of Heidegger et al.], this [obviousness] is [actually] a most massive self-blindness. Rather what happened is that experience was carved into shape by a powerful theory which posited the primacy of the individual, the neutral, the intra-mental as the locus of certainty”.

In fact, Taylor points out, undergirding this epistemological theory is actually a moral valuation: “There is an ethic here, of independence, self-control, self-responsibility, of a disengagement which brings control” . So the theory is value-laden and parades itself as “a stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses”.

First, science tips toward materialism and is accompanied by a “just-so” story that issues in regretful, nostalgic, but brave “conversions” to exclusive humanism...

“The convert to the new ethics has learned to mistrust some of his own deepest instincts, and in particular those which draw him to religious belief. . . . The crucial change is in the status accorde

d to the inclination to believe; this is the object of a radical shift in interpretation. It is no longer the impetus in us towards truth, but has become rather the most dangerous temptation to sin against the austere principles of belief-formation”

This is why Taylor seems to suggest that it is the moral force of the “scientific” story that lends it its authority, not the “evidence” (which most don’t evaluate but rather take on testimony/authority). The “discovery” story line “naturalizes” the features of “modern, liberal identity. They cannot see it as one, historically constructed understanding of human agency among others”.

In short, they don’t recognize it as a “take.”

But “the narratives of self-authorization, when examined more closely, are far from self-evident; and yet their assuming axiomatic status in the thinking of many people, is one facet of a powerful and widespread Closed World System, imposing a closed spin on the immanent frame we all share”

This isn’t a theory that we’re convinced of; it is a basic orientation that seeps into our bones, into our social imaginary.

And what is the “unthought” of secularization theorists — their background assumptions that shape their account of secularity?

Again James KA Smith summarizes Charles Taylors answer :

It is, Taylor suggests, “an outlook which holds that religion must decline either (a) because it is false, and science shows this to be so; or (b) because it is increasingly irrelevant now that we can cure ringworm by drenches [the ‘artificial-fertilizers-make-atheists’ argument]; or (c) because religion is based on authority, and modern societies give an increasingly important place to individual autonomy; or some combination of the above”

The result is an inevitably reductionistic account of religion that is unable to imagine that religion could be a true motivator for human action. It also tends to reduce religion to merely epiphenomenal beliefs about supernatural entities.

Taylor is willing to see religion as a genuine, independent, irreducible motivator for human action and social life — not something that can just be explained away as the epiphenomenon of economic or political or evolutionary factors

Taylor does not reduce religion to mere belief in supernatural entities. Instead, he emphasizes that a “transformation perspective” is essential to religion — “the perspective of a transformation of human beings which takes them beyond or outside of whatever is normally understood as human flourishing” . It is just this transformation perspective that impinges on the moral order;

So religion isn’t just about a set of propositional beliefs regarding certain kinds of supernatural entities; religion isn’t merely an epistemology and a metaphysics. It is more fundamentally about a way of life — and a “religious” way of life, on Taylor’s account, is one that calls us to more than the merely worldly, more than just “human flourishing.”

Taylor offers a different story: “the heart of ‘secularization’ ” is precisely “a decline in the transformation perspective” . So while there has certainly been a decline of religion, that’s not the most interesting story: “the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life” . It is this new placement of religion that is constitutive of our “secular age.”

It’s not just that belief in supernatural entities becomes implausible; it’s that pursuing a way of life that values something beyond human flourishing becomes unimaginable.

“Fullness” is not code for “God”; nonetheless, Taylor takes it “as axiomatic that everyone, and hence all philosophical positions, accept some definition of greatness and fullness in human life”.

Taylor identifies three “fields” of cross-pressures to fullness :

1. Agency: “the sense that we aren’t just determined, that we are active, building, creating, shaping agents”;

2. Ethics: “we have higher spiritual/ethical motives” that don’t reduce to biological instinct or “base” drives; and

3. Aesthetics: “Art, Nature moves us” because of a sense of meaning; these are not just differential responses to pleasure.

Because Taylor thinks “there is no escaping some version of . . . fullness,” the question becomes,

“Can you really give ontological space for these features short of admitting what you will want to deny, for instance, some reference to the transcendent, or to a larger cosmic force, or whatever? In other words is the intermediate position really viable?”

For example, regarding our being moved by beauty — case 3 above: Can that “experience be made sense of in an ontology excluding the transcendent”? Taylor’s answer is interesting: “Undoubtedly yes, but . . . only in part”

Can the closed take account for the force of Bach or Dante or Chartres?

“Here the challenge is to the unbeliever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment”. Or take another example from ethics: “what ontology do we need to make sense of our ethical or moral lives” ?

Can we account for moral agency within the confines of materialism? For example, can “a ‘naturalist’ account make sense of the phenomenology of universalism” ?

Taylor ends with this,

"In our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality. We all have some sense of this, which emerges in our identifying and recognizing some mode of what I have called fullness, and seeking to attain it. Modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore respondent to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it.

They are shutting out crucial features of it. So the structural characteristic of the religious (re)conversions that I described above, that one feels oneself to be breaking out of a narrower frame into a broader field, which makes sense of things in a different way, corresponds to reality."