How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K.A. Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Contested World

It may not be entirely obvious but Charles Taylor’s 2007 book, The Secular Age, was the antidote (or at least therapy) to Trump before Trump arrived on the world-scene. A shame, then, that relatively few have read it. Taylor’s book is about Fake News, about what it is, why it’s a problem now, and how it can be dealt with. Smith offers a summary and interpretation of Taylor for those who may find the latter’s 900 pages and rather more than complete footnotes too formidable to tackle.

Smith pinpoints Taylor’s thesis admirably: .“What Taylor describes as “secular” [is] a situation of fundamental contestability when it comes to belief, a sense that rival stories are always at the door offering a very different account of the world.” Smith emphasizes the sometimes subtle point that Taylor is establishing, namely that the issue today is not one of belief but of believability: “Taylor is concerned with the “conditions of belief” - a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.” To put the matter in an even more direct way: “The difference between our modern, “secular” age and past ages is not necessarily the catalogue of available beliefs but rather the default assumptions about what is believable.”

Even if one disagrees with Taylor’s analysis or Smith’s interpretation (and I have serious issues with Smith’s constant Christian apologetics), it’s impossible to deny that Taylor got the issue right: We no longer agree on reality, and this is driving us all a bit crazy. This shows up most obviously in two areas: literature and politics. The problem in both is not that there is a conflict among beliefs, as for example in the traditional doctrinal disagreements among religions, but that there is no consensus on what constitutes a correct belief about the world at all. I suggest calling this the problem of cultural epistemology for convenience.

This issue of cultural epistemology did not arrive fully formed with Taylor. It has historical antecedents. Aesthetic reflection rather than mainstream philosophy saw it coming first. Hannah Arendt, for example, in her The Life of the Mind actually made the same point as Taylor in 1971 when she articulated the distinction between truth and meaning (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). The former, she suggests, depends on the criteria established by the latter, not vice versa. And meaning is infinitely contestable as both literary scholars and biblical exegetes know only too well.

James Wood makes a roughly equivalent point to Taylor in his The Broken Estate of 1999 (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Wood is concerned lest literature become the new religion by default as the epistemological foundations of religion itself are simply ignored by an educated populace. This is a danger also recognised by Taylor who posited the tidal pull of both militant atheism and religious fundamentalism on post-modernist culture. Each of these extreme positions carries with it its own self-fulfilling criteria of epistemological validity that are deadly for, among other things, the conduct of democratic politics.

Alain de Botton in his 1998 How Proust Can Change Your Life (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) raises a similar warning. Lacking any compelling reason to choose one set of epistemological criteria over another, the ‘default’ position in today’s culture is one of ‘efficiency,’ that which requires least expenditure of effort or resources. The obvious problem with such a position is that efficiency can only be judged in terms of some superior criterion of value. And such a criterion is only discoverable through intensive political effort.

The demonstration of Taylor’s thesis in politics could hardly be more stark than in the rise of Trump in his dramatic coup of the Republican Party. It is clear that among Republicans, whatever criteria of validity may have been shared with other Americans and applied in the past are no longer applicable. Trump is correct: he could commit a murder on 5th Avenue in NYC and his supporters would not waiver. He lies, evades and manipulates on a daily basis, yet this has no effect on his ratings among his ‘base’.

This rather dramatic suspension of ‘normal’ cultural epistemology is a favourite topic of confused disbelief by those in academia and the media who have a rather different view of what Taylor calls the ‘immanent frame’ than Trump’s adherents. For example, Michiko Kakutani’s recent The Death of Truth (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) bemoans the loss of historical consensus on what constitutes truth as the source of the ‘Trump problem.’ While it is possible to empathize with her frustration over Trump’s continuous and obvious mendacity, however, her solution of imposing highly contestable criteria of epistemological validity on the debate is philosophically inane and in any case useless in dealing with the Trumpist coalition.

I dare not in this brief review present Taylor’s approach to this problem of cultural epistemology. Nor do I want to summarily condemn Smith’s (or Taylor’s) Christian bias except to say that their analysis suggests just how ultimately vacuous (and harmful) the Pauline idea of faith actually is (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) . It seems more important to me that The Secular Age become more widely read among a literate and political not just a philosophical audience. It is an essential account of our present intellectual state for every educated person.

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