Comments on: The burden of the great divide http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/01/30/the-burden-of-the-great-divide/ Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:58:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Morris Augustine http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/01/30/the-burden-of-the-great-divide/#comment-721 Morris Augustine Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:40:45 +0000 http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/01/30/the-burden-of-the-great-divide/#comment-721 I have lived, studied and taught at universities in Kyoto and Osaka, Japan for thirty-five years. The fact is that what Charles Taylor describes concerning the “Secular Age” and the “Immanent Frame” applies equally to contemporary Japan as it does to North Atlantic peoples. Of course, it was General McArthur who practically wrote the Japanese Constitution, and modeled it closely on that of the United States, but the Japanese love their Constitution, including its separation of the government from religion and its guarantee of freedom of religion. My university teachers, colleagues and students do, in fact, I believe, share a deep conviction in a Secular Age where one can believe or disbelieve, and know that one’s freedom to do so is a natural human right and is guaranteed by their government. Therefore, I question the objections voiced by Tomoko Masuzawa and by Wendy Brown in her “Idealism, materialism, secularism” contribution to which Masuzawa refers: that Taylor’s Secular Age is one which rises out of and depends on Latin Christianity. Japan's population is less than one percent Christian. Its history is deeply formed by its native Shinto, many sects of Buddhism and a strong element of Confucianism worked into its culture for over a thousand years. Today Japan is, if anything, a more secular society than is the U.S. or Europe. Yet religions of all kinds are freely practiced here, and everyone is happy to feel free to be religious or not--and it has a small but healthy Communist Party as well. I have traveled in South Korea and find that the same situation is true there. It seems to me, therefore, that Taylor's basing his incredible history of how our Secular Age arose is solidly and correctly based on Robert N. Bellah's original hypothesis that there are distinct eras or epochs in human society's entire history, and that these eras can be aptly distinguished on the world-views of peoples in every society and in every age. Every human society can be distinguished by the different understandings of their world, which until today could be divided into their different ways of seeing the world religiously: from the Archaic Age of Animism, to the Axial Age, to the Modern Age when religion became largely "disenchanted." So in effect, Charles Taylor is simply saying that our current Secular Age with its Immanent Frame marks a new stage in the way in which our human race sees its world. He describes how it slowly came to allow people the freedom to be purely materialistic, not religious, anti-religious, to "believe without belonging" to churches, synagogues, temples or ashrams, or to be fully--even fanatically--religious, so long as human rights are respected. Taylor's brilliant work seems to me to properly use Bellah's "stages of religious evolution"--even when our new Secular Age includes the freedom to believe with Marx or Freud that religion itself has been surpassed. Being a believer himself, it seems only proper that he ends by describing the various new ways of being religious, including those who, like me, see all religious traditions as springing from the same "astounding mystery" which is our cosmos. The myths of each religion were symbolic expressions of a leap of religious faith that corresponded to that particular people's understanding of the cosmos as they saw it and lived in it. I have lived, studied and taught at universities in Kyoto and Osaka, Japan for thirty-five years. The fact is that what Charles Taylor describes concerning the “Secular Age” and the “Immanent Frame” applies equally to contemporary Japan as it does to North Atlantic peoples. Of course, it was General McArthur who practically wrote the Japanese Constitution, and modeled it closely on that of the United States, but the Japanese love their Constitution, including its separation of the government from religion and its guarantee of freedom of religion.

My university teachers, colleagues and students do, in fact, I believe, share a deep conviction in a Secular Age where one can believe or disbelieve, and know that one’s freedom to do so is a natural human right and is guaranteed by their government. Therefore, I question the objections voiced by Tomoko Masuzawa and by Wendy Brown in her “Idealism, materialism, secularism” contribution to which Masuzawa refers: that Taylor’s Secular Age is one which rises out of and depends on Latin Christianity.

Japan’s population is less than one percent Christian. Its history is deeply formed by its native Shinto, many sects of Buddhism and a strong element of Confucianism worked into its culture for over a thousand years. Today Japan is, if anything, a more secular society than is the U.S. or Europe. Yet religions of all kinds are freely practiced here, and everyone is happy to feel free to be religious or not–and it has a small but healthy Communist Party as well. I have traveled in South Korea and find that the same situation is true there.

It seems to me, therefore, that Taylor’s basing his incredible history of how our Secular Age arose is solidly and correctly based on Robert N. Bellah’s original hypothesis that there are distinct eras or epochs in human society’s entire history, and that these eras can be aptly distinguished on the world-views of peoples in every society and in every age. Every human society can be distinguished by the different understandings of their world, which until today could be divided into their different ways of seeing the world religiously: from the Archaic Age of Animism, to the Axial Age, to the Modern Age when religion became largely “disenchanted.” So in effect, Charles Taylor is simply saying that our current Secular Age with its Immanent Frame marks a new stage in the way in which our human race sees its world. He describes how it slowly came to allow people the freedom to be purely materialistic, not religious, anti-religious, to “believe without belonging” to churches, synagogues, temples or ashrams, or to be fully–even fanatically–religious, so long as human rights are respected. Taylor’s brilliant work seems to me to properly use Bellah’s “stages of religious evolution”–even when our new Secular Age includes the freedom to believe with Marx or Freud that religion itself has been surpassed. Being a believer himself, it seems only proper that he ends by describing the various new ways of being religious, including those who, like me, see all religious traditions as springing from the same “astounding mystery” which is our cosmos. The myths of each religion were symbolic expressions of a leap of religious faith that corresponded to that particular people’s understanding of the cosmos as they saw it and lived in it.

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