Buffered self Archives - Bob on Books

Cover image of "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor

A Secular Age, Charles Taylor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (ISBN: 9780674026766), 2007.

Summary: How Western society moved from a shared belief in God to a secular age in which belief was one option of many.

Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, has become a primary source of sorts for anyone trying to understand our present time. On a regular basis, I come across writers invoking “disenchantment, “social imaginaries,” “the buffered self,” and “the immanent frame.” All of these concepts come out of Taylor.

Like many primary sources, reading Charles Taylor is daunting for most of us. There are 776 pages of dense text that introduce us not only to a breadth of intellectual and cultural history spanning 500 years. We also encounter a truly erudite mind, who quotes literature in several European languages (usually offering translations and weaves a number of people, events and schools of thought in an analysis that seeks to answer one question: how did we move from a world, indeed a cosmos, of shared belief in God to a secular age where belief in God was merely one option of many?

I’ll be honest. I don’t have the learning to offer a detailed analysis of this book. What I will try to do is offer a summary of the major contours of his argument. Following this, I will comment on what I thought the most significant contributions of the book. I’ll note a few questions I have. And I’ll make several suggestions for intrepid souls who want to tackle this book.

Summary

Charles Taylor makes the case that secularization is not a matter of subtracting religion from society. Rather, he traces the beginnings to the Reformation that removed hierarchy, elevating the individual. With this comes the disciplinary society, using practices to elevate the spiritual and moral life of all. In time, discipline was separated from devotion to God to stand on its own as a form of incipient humanism. Belief in God wasn’t jettisoned but relegated to a providential Deism. In turn, enlightenment science reduced a cosmos filled with God’s grandeur to an impersonal mechanism and this way of thinking spread to different aspects of society. A shift occurred from the “porous self” exposed to the workings of God and the cosmos to the “buffered self” insulated from such supernatural forces.

These developments created the conditions for what Taylor calls “the nova effect,” an explosion of different ways of believing (or not believing). They range from a theistic or deistic humanism, to a humanism without God, embracing moral virtues. Nietzsche and his followers rejected the quest for truth and morality as camouflages for the will to power. For others, the disconnect of the material world from the supernatural led to the embrace of materialist and atheist belief.

This hardly led to the eradication of belief in God. Taylor describes the era from 1800 to 1960 as “The Age of Mobilization” where movements like Catholic Action in France and Methodists and revivalists in England and North America succeeded in recruiting large numbers of people. Taylor believes that the cultural revolution of the 1960’s introduced an “Age of Authenticity” introducing a variety of religious experiences, designer belief, and the celebration of bodily pleasure.

Having lost connection with the transcendent, we live in the immanent frame, and yet we struggle to find a basis in it for some of our deepest longings, and to deal with the ultimate reality of death. We live amid cross pressures and dilemmas, including the troubling presence of human violence. He concludes the work with narratives of those who believe, often out of some sense of the transcendent. He has strong words to say about the church’s rediscovery of an incarnational life and connects this to an re-consideration of the erotic and its connection to divine love.

Significant Insights

Perhaps the most significant insight is that secularization does not mean the subtraction of religion from our view of the world. Instead, belief in God and Christianity, once shared by all, becomes one of many options.

Second, science isn’t the enemy, according to Taylor. The Reformation created the milieu leading to the eclipse of the transcendent. It’s fascinating that Taylor doesn’t think much of the atheist scientists who challenge belief.

He helps us see how radically our world has shifted, including the eclipse of the supernatural and the rise of the autonomous self.

He shows the inadequacy of humanism to address many of our deepest questions and the challenge of Nietzsche as an alternative that seems to be attractive to many embracing authoritarian leaders in our day.

Questions

While we cannot return to pre-modern times, can believing people find a way to live in a supernatural, transcendent frame? It seems that the church, pre-Christendom, and perhaps in parts of the world outside the West, faced or faces the same conditions.

This raises the question of the nearly exclusive focus on the West. What might be learned from other societies and cultures? By the same token, it could be argued that secularization has become a global phenomenon.

His comments on incarnation versus excarnation and sexuality come at the very end. I would love to know if he has developed these further.

Reading Taylor

For most of us, Taylor is a tough read. I read most books in about a week. It took me nearly three months to read A Secular Age. At the suggestion of my reading buddy, I reduced my pace to 10 pages of a day, which is about all I felt I could absorb. I wish I had kept some notes along the way, which would have made tracking Taylor’s thought easier.

Read this with a reading buddy or group. It helped me keep going and we helped each other understand Taylor’s dense prose. I had this book for years, collecting dust. I wouldn’t have finished it without my friend.

It also helps to read this along with a commentary. Several, including my reading buddy recommended, James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.

This seems to be one of those books where one reading isn’t enough. Yet, I find myself wondering if I want to set aside that much time. Ah…time will tell.

Disruptive Witness, Alan Noble. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2018.

Summary: Drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Noble explores our longing for fullness in a distracted, secular age of “buffered selves,” and the personal, communal and cultural practices Christians might pursue to disrupt our society’s secular mindset.

When I first came across this title, I was expecting something different, a call to a form of Christian activism, a form of resistance against prevailing destructive and unjust structures. This book both isn’t and is about that. Noble’s analysis looks at deeper causes in the secularism that shapes the warp and woof of our lives.

Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, Noble focuses first on the endless distraction of our lives. He illustrates from his own life:

“Sufficient to the workday are the anxieties and frustrations thereof. And so, when I need a coffee or bathroom break, I’ll use my phone to skim an article or “Like” a few posts. The distraction is a much-needed relief from the stress of work, but it also is a distraction. I still can’t hear myself think. And most of the time I really don’t want to. When I feel some guilt about spending so much time being unfocused, I tell myself it’s for my own good. I deserve this break. I need this break. But there’s no break from distraction.”

Such distractions are inimical to Christian witness in making us and those we engage with impervious to the contradictions in our fragmented lives, unable to engage in the extended reflection needed to wrestle with hard questions, and prone to present faith as just one more lifestyle option.

All this feeds into a perspective on self that is “buffered” rather than “porous”–where meaning and our understanding of ultimate reality comes from within rather than is open to the transcendent. Noble observes, “As Christianity has ceased to offer the vision of fullness shared by the vast majority of people in the West, in its place we find billions of micronarratives of fullness.” It is critical for Christians to understand this, both because they need to abandon treating their own faith as a micronarrative and then, in engaging their neighbors, must refuse to treat faith as mere preference.

The second half of Noble’s book explores how we engage in disruptive witness in a distracted world of buffered selves. He explores personal, church, and cultural practices that eventuate in disruptive witness. He begins by commending this double movement:

“This is the movement we need–a double movement in which [1] the goodness of being produces gratitude in us that [2] glorifies and acknowledges a loving, transcendent, good, and beautiful God.” [enumeration added]

For this he commends the simple practices of silence, the saying of grace at meals, and the practice of sabbath, each of which open us to gratitude that acknowledges a transcendent God.

Noble is critical of high-tech, staged worship in which “our focus is directed to the stage rather than to one another.” In place of this, drawing on James K. A. Smith, he calls for the retrieval of liturgical practices that draw us out of ourselves and remind us of the transcendent. He contends that our observance of the Lord’s supper may be one of our most disruptive acts in reminding of the transcendent God who is also immanent, sharing our body and blood, and nourishing us with his in the bread and the cup.

He also advocates culturally disruptive practice, and observes that “intimations of the transcendent” arise in our exercise of human agency, in moral obligations, and aesthetic experiences. As a good English professor, he contends that stories are a place where we may particularly encounter these intimations, offering The Great Gatsby as an example. He concludes by advocating that disruptive witness cannot play by the rules of the secular age, but rather provide a contrast of lives limited around the transcendent that, in Flannery O’Connor’s words, draw “large and startling figures.”

As I concluded the book, I found myself musing as to whether this was “disruptive” enough. In discussing this with a friend, he observed that the re-centering of our lives around a transcendent God not of our own making is pretty disruptive! Moving from distraction to attentive reflection is disruptive. Refocusing worship from an event with high production values to an encounter with the transcendent God is disruptive. Moving from stroking our personal preferences to recognizing goodness for which we are grateful and turning that to an acknowledgement of the transcendent in our daily practices, and in the stories that shape us, is disruptive.

Alan Noble encourages me that disruptive witness isn’t found in how hip, tech-savvy, plugged in, and “relevant” we are, which may be simply Christian versions of a distracted, buffered self. Rather, disruptive witness arises when our lives and cultural engagements are disrupted by the transcendent God in the gospel of his Son. Silence, sabbath, saying grace, participating in liturgy, and the expectation that the transcendent will show up in all of life may seem insignificant, and yet may be the most profound disruptions of all.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.