The Politics of ChangeBrowse SectionsMost Popular ArticlesArchived IssuesSee Our Newest Comments
Death & Dying
Send This Article to a FriendSend to a friend
Printer Friendly Version Printer Friendly
click to make font smaller
Text Size
click to make font larger

examination :: June 12, 2008

The New Atheism and the Spiritual Landscape of the West: A Conversation with Charles Taylor (Part One of Three)

by Ronald A. Kuipers


Introduction

The eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor recently agreed to sit down with Ronald Kuipers on behalf of The Other Journal to have an extended conversation about the many issues he raises in his latest book, A Secular Age. The two philosophers discussed such topics as the relationship between religion and politics, faith and philosophy, and the matter of carrying forward a religious tradition in what Taylor has described as an “age of authenticity.” In what follows, the first of a three-part interview, Taylor fields questions about atheism in particular, including how the so-called “new atheism” features in the spiritual landscape of contemporary Western society.



The Other Journal (TOJ): I want to ask you about your thoughts on atheism in general, and explore what you have to say about atheism at the end of A Secular Age.1 I’m referring in particular to what you say on pages 768-69 of A Secular Age, where you describe two possible futures for the development of religion in the West. The first future flows out of mainline secularization theory, and predicts the continuous erosion of the public relevance of religious traditions. The second future, however, foresees religious traditions remaining an important aspect of people’s ongoing spiritual search for meaning.

Charles Taylor (CT): My money is on future number two, that is, the second of the two alternatives I outline in my book. I don’t really think that religion is going to fade away and that religiously defined alternatives will be less and less common. On the contrary, well…I don’t know if you’ve read the whole book or not, given that it’s so darn long [laughter].

TOJ: I’ve read it twice actually, and taught a thirteen week graduate seminar where we worked through the entire book quite closely [laughter].

CT: Wonderful, there is at least somebody then [laughter]. As I was saying, in my final chapter I suggest that future number two is much more likely, and I hope that the previous chapters will have prepared the reader to see why I believe that religious alternatives will proliferate rather than fade away.

So we are going to have something like the pattern that I was just describing, which is not only a pattern of great variation and constant innovation, but also a pattern of different views between the generations. I mean, it’s not uncommon now for children to break from the religious views of their parents. As a matter of fact, this is the case in many Western societies, independently of whether there are very high rates of religious belief and practice, like in the U.S., or very low levels, as in countries like Sweden. This same pattern is tending to occur. For example, in the U.S. there is a recent Pew report suggesting that one in three people have changed their religious affiliation in the course of their lives. Now this may be something that is relatively trivial because Americans have a great variety of denominations and you can move from this denomination to that denomination without there being any kind of great transition or conversion. Nevertheless, it does indeed say something about the nature and future of Western societies.

TOJ: Could you elaborate further on this second future? You seem to suggest that this future is one in which human beings continue to struggle with religious questions, and more broadly with the deep sense of the basic religiousness of life.

CT: That’s how I would describe it, and the thing is that we really don’t have a generally accepted language or term to describe what this is. I think I would call it a sense of, say, eternity, but I know that there are people on the other side of my tradition who would react negatively to that term.

TOJ: So you’ve tried the word fullness as a word that might be more universally accepted?

CT: Yes, I’ve used this as a generic term on the grounds that I think everybody has some sense of, and desire for, a fantastically realized life, a life realized to the full. But in talking with people and reading reviews of the book, I’ve found that I’m often totally misunderstood on this. They thought that fullness could only be applied to explicitly religious positions, while the whole point was that I was looking for a generic term that applied to all people, whether religious or non-religious. But fullness made people shudder, which might show that the search for a universally acceptable term might be mission impossible.

TOJ: Maybe that happens because you talk about fullness as something very generic that everyone can relate to, but then you proceed to offer your unique take on fullness as something that involves a sense of transcendence. So there are secularists, atheists, or non-religious people who might not have a problem with the language of fullness per se, but who are strongly opposed to a notion of fullness that leans on the language of transcendence. It seems that it is transcendence that they really have a problem with.

CT: Well, what I tried to do in the book, and again it is so hard that it may be mission impossible, is to lay out a picture of the scene in which we are all involved, a scene that people could agree on even if they are coming from different positions. But I also wanted to add that I think we should also have full-disclosure, that is, communicating where I am coming from, where I am situating myself in the scene, and how I would then read the scene from that position. So while I do think we can come to a general agreement on the scene—the scene I just described a minute ago that’s characterized by spiritual fragmentation and proliferation—I don’t expect my readers to all agree with my more particular reading of the scene.

So I think everyone who is really open and honest will acknowledge that this is our scene, or our common situation, and that it has these three features that I outline in my book: great variety, great movement, and a great potential to be deeply shaken by other positions. I think everyone could agree to that, I think everyone should agree to that. This is a description in which I am very well-invested. But of course this scene is lived from different positions. And I think in a book like this one should do a variety of things, both describing general features that all can agree to, and being open and honest about one’s own unique position, what I describe as full-disclosure, or disclosing one’s particular way of looking at things. Sadly, however, my attempt at full-disclosure at the end of the book seems to have polluted the entire book for some people.

TOJ: I really want to talk more about this idea of full-disclosure. It seems like as soon as you do something like that as a religious philosopher, the academy immediately assumes you’re doing theology rather than philosophy, and that you’ve gone too particularistic and are no longer talking universally.

CT: Or they think you are trying to pull one over on them.

TOJ: Right, yes, something like that. I mean I think in the Immanent Frame blog Jonathan Sheehan did quite a good job of appreciating your book, but even he comes to a point where he says that “by the time the reader reaches chapter twenty it becomes clear that the book is an explicit brief for a theological critique of secularism.”2 It appears that he also felt like you turned from philosophical description to theological confession, and in that way you really were trying to pull one over on him. Sheehan’s critique is operating on a certain assumption, and I am curious to hear what you think about this widely held assumption, according to which secular philosophers consider themselves not to operate with the same type of ‘fiduciary’ spin that religious philosophers do?

CT: I think that people who react like Sheehan have a huge a priori operating. I’ve actually written on this is in the Immanent Frame very recently, but I’ve been working on this issue with Habermas and others for years.3 That is, they have what is to me this weird idea that there is such a thing as reason alone, or bare reason. In other words they assume that there are two kinds of people, those who operate on the grounds of secular reason, who reason with reason alone, and those who operate on the grounds of religious reason, who reason from extra premises derived from revelation that are uncontrolled rationally.

So when you admit you have religious faith then you immediately get scrutinized to make sure you’re not slipping in stuff. And I suppose that in my book it looks for a long time as if I’m not slipping in stuff, but then I do this full-disclosure thing at the end that makes them suspicious.

TOJ: But this is strange because it’s no secret that you’re a religious person.

CT: I know.

TOJ: If I can speculate, I guess what is maybe a little disarming is that, while your views are present in your previous writings, in A Secular Age you really come out much more strongly in terms of a thick description of your worldview.

CT: Yeah, that blows their minds. I should have told them not to read chapter twenty [laughter]. Or maybe I shouldn’t have put chapter twenty in the book, but I do think it really is something you ought to do. I mean the subject matter lends itself to this kind of disclosure because all throughout the book I am describing positions other than my own. So at some point it’s proper to disclose where I am in the scene I’ve been describing.

TOJ: Would it be fair to say that you’re describing in a general, and therefore broadly acceptable way, the history of religious development and the development of secularization in the West…

CT: That’s right…

TOJ: And one of the conclusions you come to is that what you have is this incredible proliferation or fragmentation of spiritual options or orientations, and then in chapter twenty you say, “Ok now this is the one I inhabit.” You are switching registers here are you not?

CT: Yes I’m definitely switching registers. But I spent a lot of time in the book describing phenomenologically what it was like to move away from Christianity, to reject Christianity really, and to be excited by Deism, by Jacobinism, by Nietzsche, and then more recently by Bataille, by Robinson Jeffers, and others. So why wouldn’t I describe what it’s like to convert out of this view as well, and into Christianity, which is really what chapter twenty is all about. What I want to describe is a certain form of life shared by various people, people who begin stuck in a closed reading of the immanent frame but who then break out of this closed reading. I mean take someone like Charles Péguy, who was originally an unbelieving socialist, but ended his life a practicing Roman Catholic. And someone like Flannery O’Connor, who articulates the experience of beginning to see this other dimension of existence. Or Gerard Manly Hopkins, who moves through the poetics of post-Romanticism and then into Christian faith. So all these people are people who have been in this kind of boundary situation, which is where I identify myself. This is simply another kind of experience and there is no reason why this shouldn’t also be part of the phenomenological description in the book, except that full-disclosure requires me to say, “These are all very interesting positions, but I am here.”

TOJ: That reminds me of Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.4 One of Stout’s main arguments in that book is that we really want full-disclosure of people’s religious positions in these kinds of public conversations, because what we want is to be able to have ‘abnormal’ conversations (conversations between people inhabiting radically different perspectives), and as long as we keep needing to check these differences at the door, so to speak, then we’ll never actually get to talking about what it is we really need to talk about. So I guess I’m just affirming the legitimacy of providing full-disclosure, even within a book that is predominantly philosophical; at least, I hope that such disclosure wouldn’t make the book non-philosophical, anyway. Do you have an opinion on the relationship between faith and philosophy, or on the assumption that, when you switch a register and provide full disclosure, all of a sudden you’re not doing philosophy anymore but you’re doing theology?

CT: I think that last conclusion is totally unfounded. What you need to do is to be aware of where your interlocutors are standing, and be able to distinguish between things that it ought to be possible to come to agreement on; and it’s important, if we are to go on living our lives together, that we are aware that the fact that we disagree on these fundamental issues does not mean that we need to be total enemies. And my book is really an exercise in this, in that it paints a picture of the condition of the world we are living in, and in a way that I think I can get people to agree on. And I have persuaded some people to agree on it, even though they are coming from a totally different position.

TOJ: Right. I think a lot of what your book does is a sort of immanent critique, in that when you come to discuss the views you don’t hold, you still try to describe how things might look from those perspectives, including what is actually attractive about them. And I think the service you’re doing by including chapter twenty is saying something like, “From within the view I actually inhabit this is what I find attractive about it.” And it’s not some kind of logically air-tight argument, but rather a rhetorical move to say, “This is why it persuades me and I leave it to you to determine whether you find it a persuasive picture or not.”

CT: Exactly, exactly.

TOJ: Just to bring us back to the topic of atheism, I wonder if you have any opinion regarding those who are being called the “New Atheists,” say Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, who happen to be quite militant in their rhetoric.

CT: Yes, I happen to have quite a negative view of these folks. I think their work is very intellectually shoddy. I mean there are two things that perhaps I am just totally allergic to. The first is that they all believe that there really are some knock-down arguments against belief in God. And of course this is something you can only believe if you have a scientistic, reductionist conception and explanation of everything in the world, including human beings. If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God are just closed. For example, there are certain human experiences that might direct us to God, but these would all be totally illusory if everything could be explained in scientific terms. I spend a lot of time reflecting and writing on the various human sciences and how they can be tempted into a kind of reductionism, and not only would I say that the jury is out on that, but I would argue that the likelihood of that turning out to be the proper understanding of human beings is very small. And the problem is that they just assume this reductionistic view.

The second thing I am allergic to is that they keep going on and on about the relationship between religion and violence, which on one level is fine because there is a lot of religiously-caused violence. But what they consistently fail to acknowledge is that the twentieth century was full of various atheists who were rampaging around killing millions of people. So it is simply absurd that at the end of the twentieth century someone would continue to advance the thesis that religion is the main cause of violence. I mean you’d think these people were writing in 1750, and that would be quite understandable if you were Voltaire or Locke, but to say this in 2008, well it just takes my breath away.

But then what we need to do, and this is something many religious people fail to do, is to consider why this phenomena of the new atheism is happening at this time. Atheists are reacting in the same way that religious fundamentalists reacted in the past. They are people who have been very comfortable with a sense that their particular position is what makes sense of everything and so on, and then when they are confronted by something else they just go bananas and throw up the most incredibly bad arguments in a tone of indignation and anger. And that’s the problem with that whole master narrative of secularization, what’s called the secularization thesis, that people got lulled into—you know, that religion is a thing of the past, that it’s disappearing, that it did all these terrible things but it’s going to go away and so on—because when it comes back people are just undone.

TOJ: Or when they realize it never went away….

CT: Yeah right, not only did they not notice that it was always there and never really went away, but phenomenologically in their experience it came back suddenly. Religion returned! And why? Well, for no apparent reason. It doesn’t make any sense in light of the secularization thesis. And it’s wrecking the whole universe they had tidily built. So they get terribly angry. And that makes for a very curious kind of atheism. So this tells us something about the zeitgeist, about what’s happening, about people’s having bought very deeply into a particular master narrative, namely the secularization thesis that religion is on its way out, and from which they are getting a certain degree of spiritual comfort, and now that this has been disrupted they are reacting with rage.

TOJ: That’s very interesting. So if I’m hearing you correctly you’re saying that the extreme atheist reaction to the return of religion is actually a spiritual reaction to an interrupted spiritual narrative.

CT: Exactly, and people are very deeply invested, I mean we’re all deeply invested in our spiritual narratives, but we don’t all have this sense that history is on our side. It’s terrible in that sense.

TOJ: In A Secular Age you suggest that there is a parallel between these militant atheists and really dogmatic religious people. Would it be on that score?

CT: Exactly, exactly. The militancy is stronger in the U.S. than in Canada because there is this sense among many American Christians, more so among Protestants than Catholics, that America is founded on a certain kind of inter-denominational Protestant Christianity. I mean we know that a lot of these founders were closet Deists, like Thomas Jefferson, but for the majority of Americans it really was about a providential carrying out of God’s plan and so on. And America is now split between people who hold onto this kind of national identity and others, a much smaller but more influential group who dominate the media and the universities and so on, that have a completely different read. The same constitution and the same constitutional rules are read in a secularist light; that is, there is no privileged position and that all religions are equally to be abstracted from. And the upshot is that each of these groups thinks the other has betrayed America, and is being un-American.

TOJ: So would you see both the religious fundamentalists and the militant atheist then as reactionaries? You know, driving wedges between people and leading to more misunderstanding and demonization?

CT: Absolutely.





Notes

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

2. http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/01/14/framing-the-middle/

3. http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/24/secularism-and-critique/

4. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Start or Join a Conversation! Register or Login now!


RSS feed
section highlights

click to make font smaller click to make font larger