In the passage I read last night, Taylor discusses the fundamental psychological shift that occurred with modernity, and how it orients us toward questions of religion (remember that the mission Taylor sets for himself in the book is to discuss how and why secularism rose in the West, and its implications for us today). In the pre-modern world, he writes, people saw the material world as charged with spiritual energy, and personality. Pagans saw spirits, and spiritual power, inhering in Nature, and in particular places. Christians retained many of those beliefs, though transferring much of that way of seeing the world to saints and relics, while still believing in evil spirits as actual entities which could bring harm to one. For the individual, Taylor writes, the boundary between a person and this spiritualized world was porous; absent God, the self had little protection from the spiritual forces in the world that threatened the self's integrity and well-being. For pre-moderns, says Taylor, to reject God would not mean to reject the reality of these spiritual forces; rather, it would mean rejecting the only hope one had that Good would ultimately triumph over the forces of chaos and evil.
This is a critically important point: to reject God did not mean rejecting the supernatural; it meant rejecting the best hope the individual had of protecting oneself from it. So most people found this literally unthinkable.
Human consciousness became modern, he writes, when the natural world became "disenchanted" -- that is, when man began to think of the world outside his own mind as spiritually inert, and having only the meaning we impute to it with our own minds. This, says Taylor, "buffers" the mind, putting a layer of protection between the individual and the outside world. It becomes less terrifying. It's the equivalent of saying, "There's no such thing as ghosts" -- and believing it as the truth. The disenchantment of the world ushered in Protestantism, and in turn secularism. You can see the logic. Closing the Taylor book and turning my lamp off last night, I thought that there really is no way to reconcile the African Anglicans with their UK and American counterparts; both live on completely opposite sides of the divide between modernity and pre-modernity.
The thing is, all of us in the West, believers included, live on one side of that divide, whether we want to or not. What I mean to say is that even though I, as an Orthodox Christian, plainly espouse a pre-modern belief system, the psychological and cultural environment that shaped me, and in which I live and breathe is modern and secular. As Taylor points out, this comes so natural to all us Westerners that it's hard to grasp how unusual this is in human experience, and how constructed it is.
Assuming that this is an accurate representation of Taylor, does Taylor sufficiently distinguish Faith from superstition from folk ignorance of nature? Can we really divide history into premodern and modern based on this one point? Atheism did not affect culture and science until relatively late. But more importantly, how can we talk about premodern and modern consciousness, when the difference is between the mind of a believer and an unbeliever? Perhaps even Christians are not so different from their non-believing peers in how they perceive the world -- but then again, many Western Christians are lukewarm in their faith. They pay no attention to the necessity of spiritual warfare everyday, and make no progress in their spiritual life.
Did the medievals have a stronger Faith? Maybe they did -- but Taylor's seeming reduction of Faith to just one more mental state or opinion about the world probably results in the wrong diagnosis of the problem and a wrong solution. (Dreher seems to fall in the same error, especially when he uses as support the philosophically naive account given by Daniel Everett of the Pirahã. A Christian wshould more critical in accepting someone else's word about human interaction with spirits (discernment of spirits!). The big problem is with the word "see" -- which is not being used univocally. Is the power of sight the same for all human beings? Yes. The power of imagination? Yes. But is it the case that the imagination is always made active through light striking natural objects and reflecting into the eye? No. (Otherwise, how could one accept the occurrence of supernatural "visions"?) An objective scientist would be looking for an explanation of the phenomena in other than seeing (unless he admits there is something wrong with his vision), rather than doing away with the nature of human sight. There is something other than natural seeing at work in this Pirahã incident, both from a Christian point of view and the perspective of a natural scientist/philosopher.
I once picked it up a copy of A Secular Age at B&N or Borders, and wasn't impressed by his attempt at intellectual history, so I decided it wasn't worthy buying. Now that I'm no longer thinking of becoming an academic, I don't know I'd buy Sources of the Self either.
However, I am now curious to read his characterization of the problem and the solution. (Is it anything more than a liberal account dressed with the trappings of Christianity?)
ForaTV: The Future of the Secular (lecture by Charles Taylor)
Time: Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Language Log: The Straight Ones: Dan Everett on the Pirahã
Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time
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