In the introductory pages of A Secular Age, in the service of defending the West as his geographic focus, Taylor writes:

“secularity, like other features of ‘modernity’—political structures, democratic forms, use of media, to cite a few examples—in fact find rather different expressions, and develop under the pressure of different demands and aspirations in different civilizations. We are more and more living in a world of ‘multiple modernities’. These crucial changes need to be studied in their different civilizational sites before we rush to global generalization” (Taylor 2007: 21).

Taylor’s conceptualization of the “multiple modernities” thesis is elaborated in his essay “Modernity and Difference”; here Taylor argues that there are two ways of understanding the genesis of modernity. The “cultural” theory of modernity describes the difference between pre-modern and modern societies in terms of cultural transformation. In other words, our contemporary culture is different than the culture of feudal Europe, just as the contemporary culture of the North Atlantic world is different from that of Southern Africa; culture is differentiated across both space and time.

The “acultural” theory uses a “culturally neutral” vocabulary to characterize the transition from traditional to modern society. In this view processes of modernization facilitate “the loss of traditional beliefs and allegiances” (Taylor 2000: 366). Urbanization, industrialization and the ascendance of scientific rationality erode old modes of belief or value systems. This is the classic “subtraction story” Taylor inveighs against throughout A Secular Age. And it is this theory which dominates contemporary discourses of modernity and ideologies of “developmentalism” in particular; through the shedding of traditional (i.e. backward) beliefs and customs all societies can and will converge at the point of modern reason and rationality, democratic governance and market capitalism. Difference, in this understanding, is confined to the past; the future is one of planetary generality.

As Taylor makes clear, the acultural theory of modernity is unsatisfactory. If true that all societies undergo change, such changes neither emerge from nor are productive of congruent social realities. Indeed, it is the divergent starting points of difference societies that engender the “multiple modernities” of which Taylor speaks. If all societies are confronted by, for example, urbanization, the rise of secularism and institution of the bureaucratic state, they will respond and adapt to these forces in unique ways, thereby creating new cultural forms. Any viable theory of modernity, Taylor argues, must account for both “the pull to sameness and the forces making for difference” (Taylor 2000: 367).

The theory of “multiple modernities”—and the cultural story at its core—is attractive for many reasons; it provides a counter to Eurocentric inquiries that project one normative model of modernity onto every society; and moving beyond a unidirectional understanding of modernity allows us to recognize how societal change emerges from the dialectic entanglement of a localized culture and institutions or systems of belief that arrive from without.

That said, the “multiple modernities” thesis is not devoid of pitfalls. As David Scott has argued, implied in the “multiple modernities” approach is a confining narrative of repression and resistance, of subaltern agency and overcoming: “The view here is that these subalterns are not passive objects of a dominant civilization power, merely assimilating or mimicking Europe, but rather self-conscious actors, resisting, translating, displacing, and so on, that dominant power in the course of making their own history” (Scott 2004:114). Scott contents that the idea of “multiple modernities” “operates by constructing a normative expectation of resistance or overcoming” (Scott 2004: 114). In countering the normative tendencies of the acultural story, the “multiple modernities” narrative posits a normativity of its own.

Another potential problem is that in “provincializing Europe” we obscure the complex ways in which the “alternative modernities” of the world have been conditioned by the imperialist logic of Western modernity. In other words, emphasizing the autonomy of “alternative modernities” diverts attention from an ever-more global (universal) capitalism, a fundamental aspect of modernity at large. As Frederic Jameson writes of the “alternative modernities” approach:

“Everyone knows the formula by now: . . . [T]here can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and ‘cultural’ notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself “(Jameson 2002: 12-13).

As Talal Asad notes, in a similar vein:

“If, as some anthropologists now put it, culture is always invented, if invention always opens up the possibilities for difference, then it should also be clear that the conditions of invention are no longer what they once were. More precisely, even if it is true that new cultural forms are being continuously invented in different societies, those societies now live in a single, shared world, a world brought into being by European conquest” (Asad 1992: 333).

In A Secular Age, Taylor’s invocation of the “multiple modernities” thesis permits him to isolate the North Atlantic world as his bounded geographic subject without denigrating the historical experience of those “alternative modernities” that his narrative elides. Yet in doing so he de-emphasizes 1) the relationship between Western modernity and its constitutive outside and 2) the global reach of modern capitalism (as modernity). This is another way of saying that Taylor fails to account for the centrality of imperialist processes to both “the pull to sameness and forces making for difference” in the modern world.

Asad, Talal. “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Christine Gailey, ed., Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992.

Fredric Jameson. A Singular Modernity, London: Verso, 2002.

Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. “Modernity and Difference,” in Gilroy, Grossberg and McRobbie, eds., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, London: Verso, 2000.

— A Secular Age, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

In teaching early modern history to undergraduates, I have also worked with Marc Bloch’s dictum that one ought to start with the things that one finds most foreign to oneself in the past because they provide the best way into the subject matter, and have thus emphasized the foreignness and difference of both political and religious ideas and experiences to those of most contemporary westerners. But difference begs for explanation, and the one the students are pre-programmed to accept is that such differences have been swept away by progress.

Not only is it worth challenging the Hegelian teleologies according to which secularism emerged as a ‘better’ alternative to ‘clerisy’, but we must pay close attention to whiggish efforts to locate the origins of the contemporary world (usually termed modern) in the Reformation and its sequelae–a notion that recent specialized scholarship on the Reformation and early modern Europe has destroyed. Secularism is not some Archimedean point external to ‘the religious past’, but a specific product of the Christian encounter with internal and external others, as Brown suggests. It has also been claimed to be a radical departure from religion. I find this claim extremely odd because it cannot be proven and because it seems self-evident yet no real evidence can be adduced in its support.

Perhaps secularism is a tool of empire in the same way that Christianity was and is because secularism reproduces and reinscribes many of the same antagonisms to other ‘religions’ and/or religious practices (esp. notionally superseded ones) as traditional Christianity did. Perhaps secularism is so universal in appeal because it can be used just as Christianity was once used to produce antagonistic, even genocidal, discourses about other religions–and about Christianity (or varieties thereof) as well. Secular thought thus grew out of Christian supersessionism (as did the idea of progress, surely) while reserving the right to apply the same method to its own ‘parent’.

So Taylor, sidestepping these emphases on events as either gradually or dramatically constituting secularization, seeks instead to articulate the broad discourses that, over time, condition the experience of secularism by way of a bringing-into-being of what he calls the “buffered” self, which can (but need not always) distance or disengage itself from a world of spiritual or cosmic forces. And he looks to both ethnographically-aware early modern European historiography and anthropological theory of non-Western peoples to tell his story.

It really is thus surprising that, especially because he limits his account more or less to Latin Christendom, Taylor does not engage with either the political and theological problems for the Papacy and Spanish Catholicism posed by the Reconquista or the conquest of America. Here I endorse Wendy Brown’s first critical point in her reading of Taylor: that “absent from Taylor’s account is every stripe of outsider to Latin Christendom, from Jews and Muslims in Europe to colonized natives and other outsiders, as well as dissident voices . . .”

The enduring encounter between pagan aborigines in America and the holy Spanish crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated something of a crisis for Latin Christendom—for both, one might say, its theological and its political wings. One need only look at the exchange between Sepulveda and Las Casas, staged by and for the King of Spain himself in 1550, to begin to understand that the encounter between Latin Christendom and (one of) its constitutive outsides was an important encounter between one kind of “porous” approach to selfhood and another altogether differently organized “porous” self. (The porous self is the analytical contrast to the buffered self that Taylor sets up.) Or else one could read the sometimes gorgeous (though always juristic) protests of Francisco de Vitoria to the American Indian policies of the Spanish crown to see the (basic but not unassailable) respect with which some jurist-theologians held the so-called savage inhabitants of America. Vitoria’s searching attempt to comprehend the natives as being subject to wholly other forms of social organization—rather than none at all—was not, of course, without its limits. However, his attempt to rein in Spanish aggression by referring to a Christian respect for even non-Christian peoples soon formed a foundational plank in a just war theory based on non-aggression.

Rather than giving the outlines of this sub-story of Spaniards’ confrontations with aboriginal Americans, Taylor introduces the latter in a different sub-story—of civility as a discourse important to humanism in the realm of morality. Civility, especially in the sense of having an “état policé,” was lacking in savages—who were not thought to be subject to any kind of order and, consequently, therefore lacked both religion and government.

But this is a partial story. And Taylor mentions in passing (with a reference to Montaigne as one among other “honourable exceptions”) but does not explore the point that critical social and political theories arose in Europe from opposing the interpretation of savages as lacking religion or government and arguing that they might be subjects of different sorts of religious or political organization. And, by extension, the conditions for secularism might just as much come from viewing a field of differences as from discerning presence and lack of religion or government. Or, more likely, conditions for secularism might derive in part from the continuous confrontations between and mutual modifications of the two interpretations (field of differences vis-à-vis presence/lack).

One final note, to add to Wendy Brown’s mention of “secularism as an instrument of empire.” By an historical irony which would no doubt disturb Vitoria deeply, the presumption of no prior aggression in just war theory, when combined with the civility/savage binary, becomes crucial first to Christian and later to secular punitive militarisms. To see “barbarians” as unable to follow rules, as John Stuart Mill describes them in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” to interpret their actions as irregular and aggressive in response to a European power’s sometimes (or often) provoking actions abroad, is already to move toward making particular forms of cultural and religious difference an object for just punishment and discipline by military state powers.

“What remains unquestionably idealist and antimaterialist in Taylor’s account is his commitment to tracing the production of secular consciousness within religious understanding as opposed to tracing secularization processes resulting from extrareligious forces that erode, transform, or instrumentalize a religious cosmology.”

I wonder if this contrast is perhaps a little too sharply drawn? At least in the early going, there does seem to me to be a lot that’s not specifically about the production of a secular consciousness within a religious understanding. I’m thinking of the material on ritual and festival and disgust, for instance. All this is about the *conditions* of that secular consciousness, to be sure, but that’s a little different. My own sense is that book’s focus narrows a bit as it goes–we get less and less about extrareligious processes, more and more an internal story. I suppose on could say that this simply allegorizes the story that Taylor is telling.