Social Science Research Council

In conjunction with recent post-election reflections at The Immanent Frame by Howard Adelman, Arjun Appadurai, John Esposito, Conrad Hackett, D. Michael Lindsay, Elizabeth Prodromou and John Schmalzbauer, Nicole Greenfield gathers a selection of articles that consider the role religion played in last Tuesday’s election (and the way it might figure politically in the months ahead), while Ruth Braunstein surveys news and analysis on “Voting in a year when ‘Muslim’ was a slur.” Find both of these roundups (and more) at here & there.

In our ongoing discussions, Patrick Lee Miller continues his exchange with critics of his recent post on “Immanent Spirituality,” Arjun Appadurai responds to Jason Kuznicki’s criticisms of his post, “The magic ballot” (and Kuznicki fires back), Christine Wicker and Conrad Hackett consider how best to grasp the polling impact of “evangelicals,” and readers of Christianity Today and others react to D. Michael Lindsay’s post on evangelical leaders and the “Changing of the guard.”

A worthy touchstone to arbitrate between worldviews immanent and transcendent is the désir d’éternité, the “desire to gather together the scattered moments of meaning into some kind of whole.” According to Charles Taylor, who adduces this touchstone, only transcendence has a satisfactory response to its longing: personal immortality. What response, if any, remains for immanence? Must it invent comic masks to hide the frown of an indifferent world? Must it surrender everything to the river of a senseless time? Must it be mute before the anguish of the bereaved? [...]

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed. […]

What are our moral and spiritual sources? In his magnificent and magnanimous recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor investigates a wide range of modern worldviews that are “sources of fullness,” worldviews that enrich our lives with meaning, arrange our activities to serve higher goals, and thus motivate us at times to act beyond our narrow interests. They are, to borrow from the title of his earlier work, sources of the self. More precisely, they are sources of our highest self. As such, psychoanalysis should be among them. [...]

The publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has fostered an exceptionally vibrant intellectual debate on secularism and on the conditions of belief under modernity, as the readers of this blog very well know. For the social sciences at least, this fundamental rethinking on secularism inspired by Taylor’s work could not be any timelier: the stand-off between classical secularization theorists and the proponents of the religious economies model, which has continued for about two decades is only recently giving way to new paths of investigation. Precisely because this debate offers such a crucial opportunity, I want to point out what I see as two important points of neglect in this burgeoning discussion.

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial book on the Secular, periodically engages a constituency he calls immanent materialists. I would like to pursue that discussion, focusing on a subgroup within it, to see how its devotees and those Taylor identifies with most might interact in noble ways. [...]

On April 4-5, the SSRC will co-sponsor a conference at Yale University on Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. The conference aims to enrich the debate fostered by the publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and will bring together prominent philosophers, political theorists, historians, social scientists, theologians and literary scholars who will from a variety of perspectives reflect on the question: what does it mean to live in a secular age? [...]

With the prevalence of voices casting doubts and aspersions on the so-called secularization thesis, we might imagine that the familiar story of the progress of Western modernity qua secularity is on its last legs, and that the notion of secularity itself is near bankruptcy. Upon closer inspection, however—and Charles Taylor’s latest tome provides an excellent occasion for such inspection—it appears that what is in jeopardy is the valence of “the secular,” and not the story of the long march of Western modernity itself. [...]

One of the main arguments of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is that people, at least modern secular Westerners, have come routinely to think that the world as it is must be all there is. The contrast between immanence and transcendence is thus one of Taylor’s main organizing themes. Immanence locates both our sense of reality and our sense of the good within the world around us; transcendence gives us a sense of something beyond. Taylor develops this in conjunction with a notion of “fullness” to try to evoke what it means to live in more constant engagement with that which is beyond the immediately given, the spiritual which might infuse nature, for example, or the Divine which might lift morality above a notion of ethics as mere fairness. [...]

As a story, A Secular Age rivals Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (which curiously it ignores) and does indeed belong to the largely neglected genre of speculative history. No doubt, it is a work of a lifetime’s worth of erudition – about this there can be no argument – but the easiest thing one can do is to praise it. The best and most profound of what it has to offer is precisely that the domains of thought and history it privileges be interrogated in order to stand as departure points for further thinking. This interrogation and evaluation cannot stay simply at the level of the story, but must extend to what authorizes the story, Charles Taylor’s (conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit) politics. [...]