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Charles Taylor is one of those rare philosophers who influence the conversation in several distinct fields of inquiry within their discipline. A noted Hegel scholar, he has also addressed contemporary social and political debates in books such as The Ethics of Authenticity and Multiculturalism, and he has given considerable attention to the role of religion in the modern world, in works such as A Catholic Modernity? and Varieties of Religion Today: Williams James Revisited (both of which are reviewed in this issue of Books & Culture). Taylor is perhaps best known for his magisterial work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, published by Harvard University Press in 1989.
Bruce Ellis Benson met with Taylor several months ago in New York, where Taylor was lecturing at the New School University.
We live in a secular society. What do you think that means?
To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It doesn't mean that we live in a society from which God has been expelled. I don't think we ever will live in such a society for very long; the Communists tried that. But the nature of this modern secular society is that it's deeply plural. We have to accept that the ultimate grounding of the civilization we share in common is up for grabs.
Every society has an implicit order—a set of understandings out of which its members make sense of their practices. This set of understandings I describe as a social imaginary, drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and on the work of JÜrgen Habermas and Michael Warner, among others. Why imaginary? Because it's very important to get away from the mania for strictly theoretical approaches that proceed as if these implicit understandings were explicitly spelled out in a series of propositions.
If you compare the different political cultures of the Western European and North Atlantic liberal democracies, for example, they look very similar at the level of theory. But the way the political system actually works, the deeper understanding of how the individual relates to society in France as opposed to Germany, in Canada as opposed to the United States, can be very, very different. It's that deeper underpinning that the term imaginary suggests.
In the social imaginary of Latin Christendom, God is inescapable. For the French monarchy in the Middle Ages, let's say, there's an understanding that this whole monarchical authority only exists against the background of a cosmic order, a divine order in which it occupies a certain place. And all of the ritual of coronation and anointing and so on has meaning within this context.
In the social imaginary of our secular day, the underlying moral order exists to promote the mutual benefit of individuals and defend their rights. This understanding of society, which is central to modernity, has developed over the course of several centuries. By now we are so well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one. After all, are we not all individuals? Do we not associate in society for our mutual benefit? How else to measure social life?
In such a society, the notion that moral order is ultimately grounded in God may appear to threaten to upset the kind of polite sociability and tolerance that ideally characterize the modern public sphere. From this perspective, Christianity becomes not only something that you don't need but it actually becomes a danger.
But that is itself simply one understanding of our political predicament. There are competing understandings, mutually contradictory, but none is capable of a knockout blow against all the others. That's what it means to live in a secular civilization. We will never experience the kind of unanimity about the underlying order that existed in pre-Revolutionary France. That will never exist again in human history unless we catastrophically destroy modern civilization and go back to the caves. And any attempt to impose such unanimity, whether of an atheist or a theist kind, will come to a terrible end as Communism did.
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