I get the feeling when I write about Charles Taylor, some among you find your eyes glazing over, but there is no contemporary thinker who I think is more important for helping us to move through this Post-Liberal moment if we are interested in doing that without embracing illiberal alternatives. The task, as I've written before, is not to condemn Liberalism but to transcend it, that is to absorb it while moving move beyond it without rejecting its gifts. This is how I understand what Taylor is trying to do throughout his career.
So along those lines, I think this interview in Commonweal that appeared today is worth reading in its entirety, but I found this exchange about the loss of enchantment particularly interesting:
AS: Obviously, we can’t know exactly how historical people experienced the world, but how would you characterize their connection to that order on an experiential level?
CT: It’s almost impossible for us to recover today what it felt like to live in a really “enchanted” world. But imagine being on the edge of a deep forest and sensing the power of the spirits of the wood, extending deep within it; looking at the clear sky, and seeing its adamantine beauty as the outer face of a purity unattainable on our earth; sensing on the edge of a wilderness area an immense alien power full of menace, but shot through with power from the Creator.
AS: When and how does this sense of connection and order begin to break down?
CT: We come to a breaking point in human history with the advent of modern natural science. A common understanding of modern science is that it gives the real nature of things. This invalidates all earlier understandings of the world, which we can no longer make sense of on their own terms. The whole web of metaphysical views that sustained traditional notions of cosmic order from Aristotle up to the Late Renaissance was challenged by the achievements of post-Galilean natural science. The knowledge gained in this way had a solidity and a certainty (not to speak of technological utility) that the earlier visions of order could not match. So “cosmic order” came more and more to be identified with Newton’s theory and subsequent developments and findings.
Pushed to what often seems to be its ultimate logic, the real science gives us a veridical picture of what is, but no ultimate justification of what we ought to value. So, there cannot be an authoritative standard of value, let alone one that can be shown to be an important human fulfilment.
Of course, the elimination of this standard does not, strictly speaking, follow from the findings of natural science, but many people respond to the findings by drawing this extra conclusion. Drawing this conclusion is the process which the sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” or Entzauberung. The problem with Weber’s concept is that it seems to put a whole host of different ways of thought and feeling into a single basket and declare them all invalidated. It sweeps away all religion, but also all senses of connection, which are invalidated along with different kinds of belief in magic. To be fair to Weber, his concept contains a reference to magic specifically (the Zauber in Entzauberung), but he left it open to being interpreted in a very wide sense. The new broom includes in its sweep all forms of religion and senses of cosmic connection.
A basic thesis of my book is this: Romantic poetry responds to the growing implausibility of traditional cosmic orders. How it does this is to awaken a powerful sense, a sensed experience of cosmic order, which stops short of making an ontological claim for the existence outside of experience of such an order but that leaves this question open.
AS: You say this step of disenchantment doesn’t follow, strictly speaking, from science. So why do people take that step? How do technology and industrialization and the changes they bring to human experience contribute?
CT: It is quite understandable that some people will lack the sensibility that opens us to the sense of cosmic connection, or that they can be induced to suppress this sensibility in the name of a more certain knowledge with such useful technological applications. But this suppression is not commanded by logic. In fact, many important figures in natural science have been open to the kind of reverence that a sense of cosmic connection brings (including Einstein).
There is so much more to be said about this interview, but here are a few thoughts that strike me this morning:
I read somewhere that about 40% of Americans have had what might be described as “spiritual” experiences in the William James Variety or Religious Experiences sense. This is quite a lot, but it also means that 60% have not. Assuming that this split would hold to be more or less true among the educated elites of the medieval period through the 19th Century, I’d argue that the main difference between modern societies and premodern societies is that among the elites in premodern societies, greater prestige went to the 40% who had such spiritual experiences, and these experiences provided the foundation and the inspiration for their thought. But gradually starting in the 1300s, a shift began in which greater prestige was given to the thinking and concerns of the 60%, i.e., of those who had no such spiritual experiences.
And this included theologians, especially the late medieval scholastics whose theology/philosophy became a spiritually desiccated exercise in logic and rationality. Their obsession with developing criteria for propositions that could be affirmed as certain led to Descartes and to the modern epistemological preoccupation with what constitutes truth as if it could ever adequately be formulated in clear, certain propositions. In things that really matter, such certainty and clarity is impossible, but it was possible in science, and not only that, but scientific certainty leads to all kinds of advances that benefit humans in a purely material way.
So discourse about what really matters, i.e., matters of the soul and spirit, become unreliable and subjective by comparison, and so such discourse becomes crowded out by the prestige of the new discourse of scientific certainty and all the very concrete, material benefits it produces. In other words, the new reliable discourse dominated by the experience of the 60% crowds out the old unreliable discourse of the 40%.
This sets the stage for what I laid out in the Cathedral Lectures as the Baconian Project, which requires that the cosmos and the Natural world be understood as ontologically spirit-less, as devoid of mystery and spiritual depth, that it become just neutral stuff, so many random atoms spinning about to be remolded and then exploited for human benefit.
This is how the 60% going back at least to Democritus experienced the natural world anyway, right? And so it was easy for them to dismiss the ideas about how the world was shot through with the divine as nonsense. Before the scientific revolution the 60%would say—Sure, maybe, whatever. After—there’s technological progress (and lots of money) to be made, this is new and exciting, and those old ideas about the divine get in the way.
Does that mean that the 40% were wrong, or that they just got pushed to the side by vulgar materialists who hadn’t a clue? You know my answer. As Taylor points out, there is nothing about scientific inquiry in itself that requires that those of us who live in a world shaped by post-Galilean natural science see the cosmos as devoid of the spiritual, but is there any such thing as disinterested scientific inquiry?
Of course not! It’s expensive, and the people who fund it are not disinterested, and these funders have been utterly dominated by the 60%, and, sure we got refrigerators and modern medicine, but we are living in the political/economic and ecologicial hellscape that is the reductio ad absurdum of the Baconian Project, which has been from the beginning the project of the 60%. Decade by decade from the early 1600s their influence among the culture’s elites progressed in displacing the the influence of 40% among the culture’s elites. And by the mid 19th century, the 40% had no influence at all except to write novels and poems that were reduced to optional cultural entertainments for the few who had an interest in such things.
Taylor’s book is about the most gifted among the 40% and how they fought throughout the 19th and early 20th century to preserve a sense of cosmic connection, a connection that we now need desperately to retrieve and develop further than they were able to do.
Is it too late? Is it even possible that the 40% might actually regain some influence in shaping our public discourse?
I don’t think it’s too late, and I think it’s possible because elites, even those among the 60% who are people of good will and good sense, realize that we need to make a shift. The 60% have had their time, and they’ve made a mess, and now it’s time to listen to other voices. Taylor isn’t a bad place to start.
Another voice is Dorothy Sayers. I just came across her book entitled The Mind of the Maker (1941), and I don’t know if there’s a clearer, more crisply written, and accessible exposition in a contemporary key of what I would describe as Christian Neoplatonism. It’s about the creative process, but more profoundly about how the human mind participates in the divine mind in such a way that true creativity, as opposed to mere novelty, becomes a possibility. She is a powerful articulator of a worldview firmly grounded in the experience of the 40%.