Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about secularism.
Speaker: How should we think about the emergence of secular cultures?
Speaker: What challenges does secularism face today?
Speaker: And can the secular realm exist alongside the sacred?
Speaker: Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: We're so happy to have you back with us today.
Speaker: We're talking about secularism, which is actually a topic that some of you who are on Twitter voted on.
Speaker: We had a poll and we asked you guys to pick between three different topics for our next episode.
Speaker: It was alcohol, alcohol,
Speaker: secularism and the city.
Speaker: And alcohol was winning for a while, but secularism ended up winning.
Speaker: I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, but I don't feel like thinking it through right now.
Speaker: So we're going to be talking about secularism today.
Speaker: And I guess what we kind of want to start off talking about is
Speaker: You know, is the topic of secularism actually does actually fit the theme of this podcast, which is that we're we're trying to talk about topics that are sort of on the fringe of academic philosophy.
Speaker: So, Frank, you have you have some thoughts on this.
Speaker: How does this actually fit the theme of our podcast or not?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think on its surface, secularism is a prominent topic in philosophy.
Speaker: That's because people in political philosophy often talk about freedom of religion or separation of church and state.
Speaker: So I think that's certainly right that, you know, you can see discussions of secularism in these contexts.
Speaker: But I think it's also true that like the very concept of secularism goes more or less unexamined even in these sorts of discussions.
Speaker: So even when the political philosopher is advocating freedom of conscience or freedom of religion or arguing that the state ought not to establish a particular church, the political philosopher might not really give too many arguments for secularism.
Speaker: They might sort of just taken for granted.
Speaker: And I think the reason why this is, is that a lot of political philosophy, at least up until very recently, has been kind of in-house debate between various strands of political liberalism.
Speaker: So what's political liberalism?
Speaker: Well, that's the view, more or less, that freedom is very valuable and that if the state is going to infringe on people's freedom or their liberty, then that needs to be justified.
Speaker: So take, for instance, two prominent political philosophers of
Speaker: the late 20th century, John Rawls, who we talked about before, and Robert Nozick.
Speaker: So they disagreed markedly on a lot of different things, but they're both political liberals broadly construed.
Speaker: Up until you get to the stuff where Rawls talks about economics, he more or less agrees with Nozick that the state shouldn't, you know, establish a church, shouldn't interfere in people's freedom of conscience and that sort of stuff.
Speaker: So I think the idea of secularism hasn't really been examined too much on its own terms.
Speaker: I don't think we really see too much discussion of the arguments for and against it or too much analysis of the concept.
Speaker: So in one sense, it's not fringe.
Speaker: Like political philosophers will talk about freedom of religion and whatnot.
Speaker: But there's lots more to say about secularism.
Speaker: I think this does fit the theme of the podcast nonetheless.
Speaker: I think that makes sense if you're thinking of secularism in a political context.
Speaker: I mean, for myself, when I hear the word secular, I don't think about anything political.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My first thought is just like someone's personal worldview or disposition or like maybe, I don't know, like a cultural setting.
Speaker: But I don't ever like automatically think of something like,
Speaker: Political.
Speaker: But the word secular has changed in meaning quite a bit from its origin.
Speaker: So we kind of want to talk a little bit just about different things we could mean by secular, different things that people have meant by secular, how we got this term and why it came to mean what it means today.
Speaker: Yeah, let's go back to the beginning.
Speaker: Where does this term secular come from?
Speaker: Well, so this ultimately derives from a Latin term, saeculum.
Speaker: What did that mean in Latin?
Speaker: Well, it sort of meant something like a stretch of time and age and era and epoch.
Speaker: So, for example, in the Roman Empire, they would celebrate the so-called secular games.
Speaker: So that wasn't a party where people were like, well,
Speaker: We love secularism.
Speaker: We hate religion.
Speaker: No, it was that they would celebrate every hundred years or so.
Speaker: You know, the fact that the empire was still around.
Speaker: They have gladiatorial games and they'd have beast hunts, etc.
Speaker: They'd celebrate the so-called secular games, meaning, you know, a stretch of time has passed.
Speaker: A seculum has passed.
Speaker: And this is sort of what it meant in Latin.
Speaker: When St.
Speaker: Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, he uses this term saeculum to mean something like what I just said, like an age or an era or something like that.
Speaker: He uses it in the translation.
Speaker: In the Bible.
Speaker: So the verse is, let the name of God be praised from now and unto the ages.
Speaker: That is in saeculum.
Speaker: And terms in existing languages, such as Spanish, the term for century in Spanish is siglo, and that ultimately derives from seculum, right, a stretch of time.
Speaker: But that's not really what it means nowadays.
Speaker: So secular, right?
Speaker: You were sort of gesturing at what that was, Megan.
Speaker: So what are we talking about here now?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I want to go back to the saquilum really quick because so the Canadian political theorist and philosopher Charles Taylor talks about saquilum in its original linguistic context as an epoch or time and compares and contrasts the saquilum, you know, one kind of time that we exist in normally and observe as just like a continuous period.
Speaker: and regular passing with what he refers to as the ancient concept of a higher time, which was a kind of realm or existence that existed outside in a way, or outside is the wrong term, but kind of alongside secular time, the saculum, that one enters into, for instance, when one engages in ritual or some kind of religious act where one isn't exactly, at least according to this ancient mindset, isn't exactly acting.
Speaker: In in that era, they might be doing something to harken back to a more ancient time to a people group that they identify with from like eras past or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Taylor talks about all this in his book, A Secular Age.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we'll come back to that.
Speaker: We have a lot more to say about that because that's probably the most in-depth philosophical treatment of secularism.
Speaker: So we can't go without mentioning that.
Speaker: But right, so today when someone says secular, we might think that it's, you know, sort of related to like being not religious.
Speaker: I mean, actually, you could mean broadly one of two things when you say secular now.
Speaker: You might mean just like religiously neutral.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So, you know, someone's secular, religiously neutral, if they're not, if they're just doing something that's not related to a particular religion at all, or could be appreciated by people from lots of different religions.
Speaker: So like Erasmus, right, the original humanist, maybe, his work could be understood as secular, even though he wasn't like an atheist or anything.
Speaker: Or you might mean something closer to atheist.
Speaker: You might mean like if some event is secular or some person secular, that might mean that like, you know, religion has no place in their life or in this event.
Speaker: They're hostile to religion.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a kind of hostility there.
Speaker: So you're just like a distinction between secular as neutral with respect to all these religions versus secular is kind of hostile to religion.
Speaker: Is that the idea?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or like, right.
Speaker: Secular is neutral between all different worldviews versus secular as like a success condition is that there's no religious stuff involved at all.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Going back to secularism in the political realm.
Speaker: I think this is a nice distinction that maps onto the different forms of secularism that we find in, say, the United States on the one hand versus, say, France on the other.
Speaker: So the United States might be described as a secular society.
Speaker: I think that's an accurate way to describe the United States in one sense, in the sense that the United States attempts to be neutral, or at least ideally, attempts to be neutral with respect to all the
Speaker: different religious traditions that are out there, the denominations thereof.
Speaker: So there is the so-called establishment clause in the Constitution.
Speaker: This is the First Amendment, right?
Speaker: The state cannot establish a church or any state religion.
Speaker: So that arose historically, given the wide variety of Christian denominations that existed in colonial America.
Speaker: Secularism neutrality was an attempt to deal with a fact of religious pluralism.
Speaker: But you can contrast that with the experience in France.
Speaker: So France is also described as a kind of secular society, but they have a very different history from the United States.
Speaker: So France's secularism arose as a kind of way to combat the dominance of French society by the Catholic Church.
Speaker: So French secularism ends up being a little more hostile to religion.
Speaker: So if you ask French people today, is this a secular society?
Speaker: They'll say yes.
Speaker: And then the sense in which that is, is that secularism is part of their civic identity, not in the sense of being neutral, but sort of being kind of skeptical of the dominance of any sort of church or what have you.
Speaker: That kind of origin is part of like the US founding mythos, though, still, right?
Speaker: I mean, the idea that like the original settlers came over to like gain, you know, freedom of worship.
Speaker: I mean, you know, that's certainly not the motivation a lot of them had, but that's something that like is, I don't know, built into, I guess, American mythology.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's a there's escaping persecution or what have you.
Speaker: But I think the French I don't know too much about the French experience or French politics.
Speaker: But I guess like what I do know is that they they're very skeptical of religion meddling in politics because they're worried about the kind of domination by a religious authority.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, they couldn't escape.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: And then Belgium is something totally different itself, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I learned about Belgium recently, which was their form of secularism or religious pluralism or what have you.
Speaker: It's very, very strange, I think, for those of us that are more familiar with the American model of secularism.
Speaker: So in Belgium, there are a variety of sort of official religions.
Speaker: There's like six or seven.
Speaker: So these include...
Speaker: Anglicanism, Catholicism, some other forms of Protestantism, a kind of secular humanism, Buddhism, Islam.
Speaker: And what this means is that if you are a member of one of these officially recognized religions, then you get like funding by the state for your ministers.
Speaker: For instance, the state will pay the salaries of the ministers of these officially recognized religions.
Speaker: So not all religions are officially recognized.
Speaker: Buddhism, for instance, until 2023 was not an officially recognized religion, but now it is.
Speaker: And so they get like state funding and what have you.
Speaker: So I think this is like super interesting and super weird, I guess, from the standpoint of secularism from the United States, where secularism means neutrality, right?
Speaker: The state's not going to interfere with religious, you know, religious
Speaker: Well, it means not having any state church, let alone seven of them.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So there's a way, there's a sense in what I think the Belgians wouldn't like are describing this way.
Speaker: I think they would say, no, we don't have a state church.
Speaker: But there's a sense in which they have like many established religions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so there's freedom of religion in a kind of positive sense, or the state helps you, or they give, they provide you opportunities and resources by means of which to exercise your religion.
Speaker: Whereas the model United States is more of a negative model.
Speaker: It's freedom from rather than freedom to, which is the Belgium model.
Speaker: Does that seem like an accurate way of describing it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, you might think also in the U.S., like religious people are also skeptical of getting assistance or not assistance, obviously, because churches get like tax exemptions.
Speaker: But like I feel like probably in the U.S., like religious people would be skeptical of the state like promoting their.
Speaker: Um, I don't know.
Speaker: It seems like is this like a tit for tat situation in Belgium?
Speaker: Like if you are promoted by the government or does that mean that you kind of have to like, you know, like talk like can you not criticize the guy?
Speaker: I have no idea.
Speaker: I don't I don't I'm not sure at all.
Speaker: I don't I doubt that that's true.
Speaker: I feel like that's what I would be nervous about.
Speaker: Like, why are you promoting me?
Speaker: Do I have to you know, can I not can I not criticize you in my like newsletter or something?
Speaker: We'll ask some Belgians.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Do we know some Belgians?
Speaker: If there's anyone who knows anything about Belgium out there, please let us know how this works.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So at this point in time, in like, especially in Western nations, most of them, secularism is basically assumed.
Speaker: It's like the default.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Well, maybe, you know, this might not echo the causal explanation, but we can give like a reasons explanation for why.
Speaker: There's certainly arguments that
Speaker: for secularism.
Speaker: And, you know, I would imagine like a big motivator for Western societies creating or wanting to create secular societies is just sort of like the tumult and turmoil experienced in like wars of religion across the world.
Speaker: You know, one of the biggest causes of wars probably.
Speaker: And, you know, you can imagine a big motivating factor would be, well, gosh, it would be really nice if all of these people with all these different ideas, you know, humans, these thinking, you know, apes are going to continue to think and continue to have ideas that diverge from other humans' ideas.
Speaker: And it would be really great if we didn't have to keep, like, you know, factioning off and starting new tribes or groups or countries every time this happens.
Speaker: How can we just, like, live peacefully together?
Speaker: Yeah, that's what I think of when I think of why we want this.
Speaker: I think of the wars of religion in Western Europe in the 17th century, Catholics killing Protestants, Protestants killing Catholics.
Speaker: And so this is, I think, sort of characterizes the Western experience of secularism.
Speaker: But also it is worth noting that India, for instance, has a pretty robust secular tradition and they're motivated by similar sorts of reasons.
Speaker: India is a country with many different ethnicities and many different religions.
Speaker: Islam and Hinduism are both very prominent religions.
Speaker: Buddhism.
Speaker: Buddhism in India.
Speaker: And the argument is we need peace.
Speaker: We need order.
Speaker: Secularism is a great way to secure these things.
Speaker: Secularism is needed for modernity.
Speaker: We want to have a robust economy.
Speaker: How do we get that?
Speaker: Well, we need peace and order first.
Speaker: And so we need the state to at least be neutral with respect to the various religions that are out there.
Speaker: So that seems like the main argument.
Speaker: We need secularism for peace and order, stability and the like.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And we should mention that these ideas are not just confined to the philosophy seminar room.
Speaker: We can find these ideas out there in the real world.
Speaker: So politicians, for instance, will say this sort of stuff.
Speaker: Here's a quote from the former U.S. President Barack Obama.
Speaker: And he says the following.
Speaker: The religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.
Speaker: Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect.
Speaker: So what Obama is talking about here is what the philosopher John Rawls would call a public reason.
Speaker: That is, when you give arguments in the public's
Speaker: fear, you need to make sure your arguments are in purely secular terms.
Speaker: You can appeal to certain values, but those values need to be secular, widely shared values.
Speaker: Things like appeals to freedom or appeals to rights or equality of opportunity, that sort of stuff.
Speaker: You can't make appeals to divine revelation or your specific religious tradition.
Speaker: That doesn't fly in a liberal democracy.
Speaker: So that's kind of like an entirely too brief overview of some arguments for political secularism.
Speaker: We'll talk more about that later on in the episode.
Speaker: But for now, you know, those are those are arguments for political secularism.
Speaker: But of course, they're not arguments for individual secularism.
Speaker: They're not arguments for like personal secularism.
Speaker: And I mentioned this earlier that one of the most I mean, probably as far as I know, like the most
Speaker: lengthy scholarly in-depth treatment of secularism as like a worldwide phenomenon is a book called A Secular Age by the Canadian political theorist and philosopher Charles Taylor.
Speaker: And this book is monstrous.
Speaker: It's almost a thousand pages long, but it's it's so worth it.
Speaker: In my opinion, it's just I mean, it's one of my favorite reads.
Speaker: You've read the whole thing, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You listen to it on audiobook, though.
Speaker: I listen to part of it on audiobook.
Speaker: But yeah, I've I in some way I've taken in the entirety of its content.
Speaker: And I should mention that I've read some of it.
Speaker: I've read 280 pages of it, which is enough to be a book.
Speaker: But I'm still making my way through it.
Speaker: It's really good.
Speaker: Megan recommended it to me.
Speaker: She's like, you'll love this book.
Speaker: And I do want to make a plug for it.
Speaker: It's a really good book.
Speaker: I had never heard of it until Megan mentioned it, which is kind of sad.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Like, why have I not heard of this book?
Speaker: It's really good.
Speaker: You know, it weaves together really good theorizing with expansive knowledge of history, which is awesome.
Speaker: Foster should do that more.
Speaker: You know where I got that book?
Speaker: Where?
Speaker: I actually got that book from, so people who are in academia will know what I'm talking about.
Speaker: But when a professor, like, when they, like, go to a different job or retire, they always leave behind, like, hundreds of books.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They don't want to move them.
Speaker: And this is, like, great if you're a grad student.
Speaker: You're, like, awesome.
Speaker: Free books.
Speaker: And that was one of the free books that I got.
Speaker: I don't remember whose it was.
Speaker: Was it in Madison?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So someone in Madison was reading that book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't remember who it was, though.
Speaker: But anyway, yeah, so it's one of my favorite works of philosophy.
Speaker: And, you know, at this point I've been going on about it.
Speaker: I should tell you what it's about.
Speaker: So what Taylor's trying to do in this book is give a kind of a sort of explanation about how we've come to a point in human history where being secular, either religiously unaffiliated or agnostic or atheist, or
Speaker: is like not only a possible choice one could make, but like actually like a really live option.
Speaker: So how did we go from a couple millennia ago where secularity wasn't even really a live option, either being secular personally or politically really, to a point in history where this is a really live option and in fact is the default?
Speaker: So what he tries to do is offer a kind of explanation.
Speaker: And the kind of explanation he offers is one where the possibility for being secular arises through like a movement in the history of ideas.
Speaker: We can contrast this with how, say, a Marxist, for instance, might explain the rise of secularism.
Speaker: So the Marxist is a materialist in the sense that they want to explain the movements of history, the rise and fall of empires and whatever, purely in terms of class struggle for material goods, for resources, for economic resources.
Speaker: So the Marxists might say, well, secularism arose because people realized that it was needed in order to have a commercial society and all of that sort of thing.
Speaker: So really.
Speaker: Or alternatively, that like religiosity wasn't needed.
Speaker: Or religiosity wasn't needed.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like a purely commercial society could provide all the needs people have up until the rise of secularism, religious institutions provided for people's needs.
Speaker: but they're not needed anymore, and so it goes away.
Speaker: So the Marxist is going to explain all this stuff purely in terms of economic motives and material interests.
Speaker: So Taylor, he acknowledges that, of course, this has to play some role, but he wants to reject the Marxist insistence on purely material explanations, that he thinks ideology, that is the ideas, surely play some role in this.
Speaker: So he's going to be a pluralist.
Speaker: about the explanatory mechanisms.
Speaker: Some of it is material, that is, some of it has to do with economic interests and whatever, but surely some of it has to do with people's ideas, their worldviews, their ideologies.
Speaker: Yeah, and a big part of that is that Taylor is really amenable to or sympathetic with William James, who in his Varieties of Religious Experience, which is a long-form essay of his, starts out by talking about a precondition of belief is that something is a live option for you to believe it.
Speaker: So like here in the West, you know, there's probably a lot of different Eastern religions or or belief belief groups or different religions in like Africa that we don't even know about.
Speaker: Or if we did know about them, they seem like very foreign, very strange to us.
Speaker: And because of this lack of familiarity, because it doesn't permeate.
Speaker: our view of the world or our, what Taylor calls, social imaginary.
Speaker: It's not a live option for belief for us.
Speaker: So Taylor's really interested in this question about how secularism went from being not a live option for belief to a live option for belief that's like really in our face.
Speaker: It's kind of the default, like I was saying.
Speaker: And right, like Frank was saying, he's going to disagree with the Marxists that we can explain all of this in terms of just material conditions and
Speaker: class struggle for better material conditions.
Speaker: He's going to say, actually, like the movement of ideas that, you know, starts with the thinkers and then permeates the general public, that plays a big role, too.
Speaker: I think even if you are familiar with some alternative religion, it just isn't a live option for you.
Speaker: So as we've mentioned before, I'm always spending time with the ancient Romans and I know a lot about the Roman religious practices and I'm very familiar with them.
Speaker: But, you know, it's not a live option for me.
Speaker: I can't make sacrifices to Jupiter as much as I might want to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not going to work for me.
Speaker: Everyone who heard your really persuasive arguments for polytheism in that episode is like, they're like so disappointed.
Speaker: Yeah, sorry.
Speaker: I tried.
Speaker: I tried.
Speaker: All right, Megan, can we go back to this distinction that you made earlier on when you first started talking about Taylor between like different kinds of time?
Speaker: So I remember this part of the book, but it was really obscure to me.
Speaker: I don't know if you've even written a bit about this.
Speaker: So what is this?
Speaker: These two kinds of time again, like we'll be talking about there.
Speaker: And why does that matter?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So let me let me try to let's talk about this again.
Speaker: So, right.
Speaker: This is right at the beginning of a secular age.
Speaker: Taylor's talking about, you know, he's talking about ancient history.
Speaker: He's talking about like first century stuff.
Speaker: And maybe compare them to us.
Speaker: Like, what are we missing?
Speaker: Like the ancients had something that we don't have.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, what is that?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot.
Speaker: It's hard to compare because at least, you know, as Taylor theorizes it, their way of perceiving the world, which he calls the social imaginary, is radically, radically different than ours.
Speaker: So he has these two categories.
Speaker: He starts out with discussing these two categories.
Speaker: He calls it secular time and higher time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you brought up the Saeculum, secular time, the era that we're existing in right now for the Saeculum is kind of an era.
Speaker: It's a time.
Speaker: It's this world.
Speaker: It becomes this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So the Saeculum is what we exist in normally from day in to day out.
Speaker: When I go to cook a meal or I mean, you know, OK, fine.
Speaker: You cook meals, but whatever.
Speaker: When one of us goes to cook a meal.
Speaker: You cook fish, though.
Speaker: You cook the fish.
Speaker: Yeah, when I go to cook some fish or, you know, you go to take a shower or whatever, that's all being done in the saquilum.
Speaker: But when someone goes to mass and takes the Eucharist, for instance, or something like that, engages in some kind of religious ritual, in that instance, that's engaging in what Taylor would call a higher time.
Speaker: And here's a good illustration of this.
Speaker: Think of a Jewish family who has who engages in a Passover meal together.
Speaker: That's like a big thing, right?
Speaker: It's it's it's a long ritual meal.
Speaker: And what it's doing explicitly is hearkening back to a particular time in, you know, history or at least in the historical myth, you know, whether or not it happened or not.
Speaker: Where in the story, the angel of death passed over the houses of Jewish people with the blood on the doorframe.
Speaker: So that's like a really explicit way of understanding what it means to engage in a higher time.
Speaker: It's not really engaging in the saeculum.
Speaker: It's in a different, I don't want to say a different timeline, but it's an attempt to connect with something that's not in the saeculum.
Speaker: Yeah, but I guess like from the standpoint of being in the saeculum, I'm in the saeculum right now.
Speaker: We're sitting here recording this.
Speaker: Isn't that just sort of like symbolic or memorial?
Speaker: It's not as though they're like rising up from like the current timeline to like another timeline, right?
Speaker: Like or what?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think Taylor would say this distinction between like the symbolic and the actual wouldn't have made a lot of sense to the ancient people who had this conception.
Speaker: That there was something real about recognizing the Passover in the sense where you're actually engaging.
Speaker: You're being transported back.
Speaker: You're engaging in the entirety of all of your peoples, you know, engaging in the Passover.
Speaker: So you're one with them.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so this is, so the, so the, bring this back to secularism, the loss of this sort of notion or.
Speaker: Well, so the important idea here is that for the ancient mind, the higher times permeated the secular.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: There wasn't this sharp distinction.
Speaker: And in fact, through ritual, through religious recognition, and through encounters with, say, good and evil spirits, one could encounter or one sort of goes between both.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's like a normal part of human experience.
Speaker: Taylor calls this view of the self existing between the, you know, in the midst of these two different times, who is sort of vulnerable to
Speaker: to shifts in this sort of way.
Speaker: He calls that a porous self, the idea of the self as porous, as vulnerable to like the- The environment, right?
Speaker: Yeah, well, the environment in a broad sense.
Speaker: In contrast to what he calls the buffered self, which is he thinks our conception of ourselves now.
Speaker: So can you say a bit about that?
Speaker: Because that that seems to be a crucial element of secularism as a kind of social imaginary.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So the buffered self is the term that Taylor gives to the modern idea of the self.
Speaker: And by modern, I don't mean contemporary necessarily.
Speaker: I mean, starting in around the late 16th century.
Speaker: And so we kind of see a really good picture of the modern self in the work of the philosopher René Descartes, who, among other things, spends a lot of time talking about the self as something that is unable to really be affected at all by the environment.
Speaker: It's something that I can completely control.
Speaker: I can...
Speaker: My true self, the nugget that is me, is spirit.
Speaker: It's kind of ghostly.
Speaker: It's within my body, but it can't really be affected by my body unless I let it, I guess.
Speaker: But it's something that can't be affected from physical conditions, from the environment.
Speaker: So this idea of a buffered self, of course, sort of leads naturally into what we might think of as kind of common sense or might be at least our automatic picture of
Speaker: of the you know if you go out and pull people on the street they do tend to think of a human person as like in two different parts there's like the body and the soul i got i got a mind and a body a mind and a body yeah exactly uh and in you know even in philosophy we refer to questions about you know the the mental or psychic and the in the physical is you know like the mind body problem we have these two categories we work
Speaker: with them pretty fluidly.
Speaker: This distinction between the mind and the body, which Taylor sees as really like an extremely modern phenomenon, an extremely modern idea, is necessary groundwork for secularism Taylor thinks even being possible.
Speaker: This idea that maybe like reasoning or forming societies or whatever, that this can be done on a purely physical plane.
Speaker: a purely physical plane.
Speaker: So can you clarify, what do you mean by that?
Speaker: Can you clarify that a little bit?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So like in our day to day life as civilians in a city, we're not doing I mean, we might do things personally religious, like we might go to church or temple or whatever, but we're not our day to day life, like out in the city or town or wherever we live.
Speaker: That's not like an explicitly religious kind of experience.
Speaker: So the idea is that there is like maybe the religious realm, which is private and personal versus, you know, the the the worldly realm.
Speaker: Which is not at all religious or spiritual.
Speaker: And these two are like separate things kind of corresponding to the physical and the spiritual or mental or psychic or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So Descartes cleaves the person into two separate spheres, right?
Speaker: The mental, spiritual, whatever, and the bodily, physical.
Speaker: And that's supposed to mirror the two spheres of society, right?
Speaker: Like the kind of like religious sphere, which is private, right?
Speaker: And then the worldly, secular sphere, which is physical.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, as Taylor talks about it, you know, ancient religiosity, even for religions that we're really familiar with today, like Christianity, you know, this kind of private belief or like private, you know, feeling of assuredness that we're right about some, you know, some doctrine or whatever.
Speaker: That was like a really minimal or like completely absent part of religious life.
Speaker: Religious life was almost entirely about practice.
Speaker: about what you go out and right so it so early christianity you want to say emphasize praxis or practice over over credo belief yeah and this was necessary in you know for kind of boring reasons because the vast majority of say christians were illiterate uh they they they literally couldn't read you know these scriptures and the sermons were not in a language they spoke and so they they just really didn't
Speaker: they didn't know, you know, the theory behind it.
Speaker: They really just knew that they were supposed to go to, you know, the church as much as they could and receive the Eucharist and confess the bad things they did.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So Megan's mentioned two elements, according to Charles Taylor, that are relevant to the rise of secularism.
Speaker: Two elements, I think, that don't really receive a lot of attention elsewhere.
Speaker: So we talked about thus far the distinction between secular time and higher time.
Speaker: and this distinction between the porous self and the buffered self.
Speaker: So there's one other element that's a little more familiar, I think, to the general audience for explaining the rise of secularism, and that is the Protestant Reformation.
Speaker: So on its surface, that sounds kind of weird, right?
Speaker: So how could a movement in the history of a particular religion lead to secularism?
Speaker: But this is actually a pretty popular thesis.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Yeah, it's not new to Taylor.
Speaker: Max Weber is the guy who's known for kind of, I mean, coming up with this idea, which is pretty widely accepted as far as I know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Taylor relies pretty heavily on Weber here.
Speaker: And so how is the Reformation relevant to secularism?
Speaker: Well, the Protestant Reformation rejected any sort of notion of like an otherworldly spiritual vocation that is for a select few.
Speaker: Things like extremist forms of asceticism or monasticism.
Speaker: And these were integral parts of Christianity.
Speaker: Catholic Christianity for centuries.
Speaker: So the Protestant Reformation rejected this sort of thing.
Speaker: They were kind of skeptical of religious authority.
Speaker: So they still had priests, but they were skeptical that religious authority should play, I don't know, like a super important role in people's lives.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Martin Luther himself was a monk who ceased to be a monk after his 95 theses and in fact married a former nun.
Speaker: And it wasn't as though like in the entirety of the Protestant Reformation, all forms of like asceticism or monasticism were monastic.
Speaker: eschewed.
Speaker: Like people still saw them as good, but they saw them as goods commensurate with, you know, a married life of working on a farm or something that they're like completely equal rather than one of them being a higher calling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you can live like a fully entirely Christian life doing like this worldly thing.
Speaker: And you would be doing something just as good as like the Virgin Mary did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so this sort of leads to a kind of collapse of the distinction between, let's go to Taylor, the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
Speaker: So like Catholicism, at least historically, put a lot of emphasis on things like relics.
Speaker: People would go to the Middle East or the Holy Land to try to find shards of the true cross or the spear that pierced Christ or, you know, even like
Speaker: The pieces of like bones of saints.
Speaker: Finger bone, like some martyr or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And every and every every cathedral like had its own relics.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like these are the relics of our cathedral.
Speaker: A lot of them still do.
Speaker: And this is all super important for Catholicism.
Speaker: And this is totally done away with by Protestantism.
Speaker: Like very, very skeptical of things like relics.
Speaker: And in fact, that kind of thing, I think, is seen as, I don't know if I want to say goofy, but like it's sort of like looked down on is, you know, worshiping what's ordinary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What did the reformers think the Catholics were doing?
Speaker: They thought they were worshiping the bread in the Eucharist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, so the Protestantism kind of almost counterintuitively leads to a kind of, at least according to Taylor and people like Weber, a kind of a disenchantment of the world.
Speaker: Yeah, that's his term.
Speaker: That's Weber's term.
Speaker: And a kind of like this destruction of the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
Speaker: There really is not a sacred domain anymore, at least in the sense in which there was in Catholic Christianity.
Speaker: And I mean, I think charitably the goal was to make, you know, make everything sacred.
Speaker: You know, like the initial, I think, Protestant idea was that like, oh, there is like this like spiritual nobility and just like being, you know, being like a humble farmer.
Speaker: And working hard, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is the title of Weber's book is Protestantism.
Speaker: Protestant ethic and the spirit.
Speaker: Protestant Ethnic and Spirit of Capitalism, he thought Protestantism also played a role in the construction of commercial society and modern day capitalism.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's connected to that sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, because the idea is that there is, you know, the charitable reading of this is that there is a kind of spiritual importance about, you know, the very humble life.
Speaker: And and so then the the Catholic emphasis on these higher callings that are, you know, an emphasis on like adoration of the host and stuff like that.
Speaker: That scene is like, you know, maybe prideful vanity.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess in Catholic Christianity, the monks were thought to be closer to God than the ordinary person.
Speaker: And that's why the ordinary people would maintain the livelihood of the monks.
Speaker: They were they were closer to God than us ordinaries.
Speaker: So they were praying for the people like all day long.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But but the result of this isn't that everything was made more sacred, but that but everything was rendered less sacred, at least according to Taylor and Weber.
Speaker: And I guess some modern day Catholics.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because there are some modern day Catholics that will blame the Protestant Reformation for what they view as an increasingly secular society, which is a pejorative for them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, Taylor's a Catholic.
Speaker: And I mean, I think he sees the story as complicated, but definitely sees the Protestant Reformation as really accelerating the current situation that we're in.
Speaker: And a result of that has been that recently.
Speaker: So earlier, Frank was saying that it's kind of.
Speaker: That most of the political philosophy for the last, you know, several centuries has been intramural debate among people assuming a kind of political secularism, assuming a kind of state neutrality, at least that that's like an inoptimal place to end up, starting from maybe John Locke.
Speaker: Yeah, well, like the lock, for instance, divides, you know, our society into a religious society, which is private and civil society, which is public.
Speaker: You know, the religious realm deals with your happiness in the other world and the civil realm deals with your happiness in this world.
Speaker: Ne'er should these two meet.
Speaker: Ne'er should these two meet.
Speaker: Completely separate.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: And then, you know, yeah, from there on out in Western thought, the presumption by the majority has been that this is the ideal.
Speaker: This is what we want to avoid these kinds of wars of religion and unnecessary infighting.
Speaker: But recently, this has not been the case.
Speaker: So there has been a...
Speaker: handful of, I guess, work that's gotten a lot of attention in, you know, Western philosophical thought in the last couple decades that is considered what's called like post-liberal political philosophy of thinkers.
Speaker: And they're often, almost all the time, they're religious, most of the time Catholic, although not entirely.
Speaker: Philosophers and political theorists
Speaker: who think, you know, actually secular liberalism and liberalism used in the, you know.
Speaker: The general sense we said earlier where it's like just the idea that freedom is valuable.
Speaker: Like we start with freedom.
Speaker: Individuals are free and equal.
Speaker: And if the state is going to infringe on their freedom, they need a very good reason to do so.
Speaker: The default is freedom.
Speaker: The state ought to be neutral with respect to religious worldviews.
Speaker: And just sort of kind of manage things so that everything's stable and ordinary or orderly and the economy flourishes and whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this handful of thinkers, maybe more than a handful, post liberals say, well, you know, that sounds nice, but it would never work.
Speaker: Or I mean, some of them actually don't even think that sounds nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, but think, you know, we've tried liberalism and at least, you know, by their estimation of this has failed, that it's not actually good, not just for like society at large, but even for the individuals in it, that maybe the freedom that people think they have is kind of illusory, that they're not actually free to practice their religion or whatever they think they are because there's no one forcing them to do this and so, but maybe like
Speaker: Maybe we need the state kind of like telling us what to do or guiding us into a certain worldview or religion.
Speaker: And that kind of without that, we lack a sort of we lack an important kind of freedom to become good.
Speaker: So the post liberal thinks that, yeah, secularism is good for the irreligious, but it's a raw deal for the religious.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Good for the irreligious, bad for the religious.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so who are these thinkers that you alluded to?
Speaker: Although we should clarify, the post-liberal thinks that secularism will seem good to the irreligious.
Speaker: Oh, right, right, right, right.
Speaker: Actually, the irreligious would not.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's right.
Speaker: So the irreligious think they're flourishing, but they're not actually.
Speaker: Yeah, at least for the religious post-liberal.
Speaker: Not all post-liberals are religious.
Speaker: I mean, you could call Michael Sandel a kind of, he's a communitarian.
Speaker: I don't think he's religious.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But who are they?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, I guess in philosophy proper, probably the earliest, most popular case of it would be Alice Dare McIntyre.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Who began his philosophical career as a Marxist and has ended.
Speaker: I don't want to say ended because he's still alive and writing stuff.
Speaker: Has come to the point of he is now he is a Catholic, an Irish Catholic, I believe.
Speaker: Someone's going to correct me on that in the comments.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And he's a communitarian.
Speaker: So he, I think, in philosophy, he kind of got the ball rolling a while ago in like the 80s or when was after Virtue written?
Speaker: He was Scottish, by the way.
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: Close enough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 81, 81.
Speaker: 81.
Speaker: Okay, yes, so in the 80s.
Speaker: But in more popular press, so outside of philosophy, I think a lot of this gets started with a guy named Rod Dreher, who a lot of you will know as being the person who runs the American Conservative blog, although he does not live in America any longer.
Speaker: But he still writes for the American Conservative, I guess because he is American.
Speaker: He doesn't live in America anymore.
Speaker: But Rod Dreher, he came out with this book.
Speaker: Frank, you should look this up what year it came out, The Benedict Option.
Speaker: The Benedict Option was kind of the first book that I know of that became really popular that sort of looked askance at liberalism.
Speaker: And while it didn't advocate for like changing the government,
Speaker: It did advocate that Christians specifically should like go and live in communities, you know, by themselves, like specifically Christian communities, sort of like as the Amish do, but not necessarily in an Amish lifestyle.
Speaker: He's he's Orthodox, I believe.
Speaker: So it came out in 2017, and it is supposed to be influenced by Benedictine monks.
Speaker: Yes, that's right.
Speaker: Which is funny because Dreher's not a Catholic.
Speaker: He wasn't a Catholic when he wrote that.
Speaker: And influenced by McIntyre.
Speaker: Yes, that's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So that's the first one that I remember thinking really made some waves.
Speaker: But, of course, it wasn't exactly post-liberalism because he didn't really advocate trying to change the government.
Speaker: But now...
Speaker: You have people coming along like Patrick Deenan and Adrian Vermeule.
Speaker: Yeah, Harvard Law Professor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is it Vermeule or Vermeule?
Speaker: I'm going to go with Mule.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker: And they're post-liberal in a much more explicit sense, where they think that the project of liberalism and political philosophy has failed, that it's demonstrably failed, and that we need to replace it with a regime, a government, that is based on what John Rawls, another political philosopher, would call a comprehensive doctrine of the good.
Speaker: And interestingly, post-liberalism, so probably a lot of our listeners know this, that there has been like a real rise in what might be called like influencers, like far right influencers who are sort of like explicitly advocating for nationalism.
Speaker: And the interesting thing about what we're seeing in a lot of these people, like people like Nick Fuentes or something, is
Speaker: is that they will use explicitly religious concepts, like explicitly Christian concepts and language, and in fact advocate for like a Christian nationalism society.
Speaker: But they are not religious.
Speaker: So they're still in the saquulum, right?
Speaker: So it seems like they're violating secularism, but at least from like the way Taylor thinks about this, right, this is still very this-worldly, kind of paradoxical.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's... Well, and it's even bringing...
Speaker: It's bringing religion into the saculum in this really explicit way where it's totally drained of all of what Taylor would call the enchantment.
Speaker: And it's purely utilitarian with maybe some, maybe they like the aesthetic as well or something.
Speaker: Or often they'll say stuff like, well, we need that as like a common moral grounds.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is also happening in India.
Speaker: And I don't know a ton about this, but I do know that India is seeing a rise in Hindu nationalism and that this has been going on for a while.
Speaker: But we see a similar phenomenon there where the Hindu nationalists are anti-liberals, but weirdly, a lot of the leaders of these movements are not actually religious.
Speaker: So like one really popular one is explicitly, he like eats beef and is not, does not seem to be religious in any way, but kind of co-ops like this religious imagery or these concepts to, I guess, maybe like gain followers or maybe
Speaker: Does he like the values of Hinduism?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Yeah, I think he sees it as like a common, maybe like a common past to draw everyone together like a like an umbrella.
Speaker: I guess the idea is like, OK, with like this kind of rootless, this kind of like traditionless society is not viable.
Speaker: We need some kind of tradition, whatever it is.
Speaker: I need something.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We need something.
Speaker: And it's weird that a lot of the contemporary religious nationalist movements seem like this need can be completely separated from whether or not the actual tenets are true.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: It seems like this is somewhat of a global phenomenon.
Speaker: I mean, we're out of our depths here, right?
Speaker: Sort of.
Speaker: Wildly out of this.
Speaker: So Megan has some data.
Speaker: If you recall, in our first episode, I said we'd like to be empirically informed here on Flossy on the fringes, at least insofar as that is possible.
Speaker: So what's this data you have here, Megan?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's a lot of really interesting data.
Speaker: I'm just going to be talking about America right now.
Speaker: I mean, United States, because there's too much data to do anything else.
Speaker: But we hear like all I feel like everyone hears all the time.
Speaker: Oh, the number of religiously unaffiliated people is increasing.
Speaker: This is true.
Speaker: It has slowed down the rate of increase in the last couple of years, but it's still raising, rising pretty steadily.
Speaker: So as of like six months ago, with the most recent Gallup poll on this, around 21 percent of Americans identify as a quote unquote religious nun, which is that they're not affiliated with any particular religion.
Speaker: 21 percent.
Speaker: And this, I mean, to put this in perspective, in the 1950s, this was like two percent.
Speaker: So it's a pretty big it's a pretty big increase.
Speaker: And on top of that, the people who identify as religious nuns are that category is not only growing, they're also at least according to the Pew Research Center.
Speaker: Poles, they're becoming more, and they use this word, secular.
Speaker: So for instance, when asked how important is religion, so these are all people who identify as religious nuns, when asked how important is religion in your life, the number of people, the number of religious nuns who said none at all,
Speaker: has gone up to 65% from 57% in the last few years.
Speaker: And when asked, how often do you pray?
Speaker: 62% say never up from a few years ago where it was 56%.
Speaker: So I'm not going to go through all the minutia of this, but 21% religious nuns and the nuns
Speaker: You know, maybe several years ago, the religious nuns were still like kind of religious, even if they didn't fit neatly into any particular religious box.
Speaker: But now it seems like they're becoming less religious.
Speaker: So that's all interesting.
Speaker: But there's some there's some interesting data from the other direction, too.
Speaker: So as of 2009, that's not very recent data, but this is the most recent that this poll has ever been done.
Speaker: So polls in 2009, have you ever had a religious or mystical experience?
Speaker: And the number of 2009 was 49% of people said yes.
Speaker: Now, this is interesting because in 1962, what percentage of people do you think said yes?
Speaker: Just take a guess.
Speaker: 68.
Speaker: No, 22.
Speaker: So less.
Speaker: Way less.
Speaker: In our so-called secular age.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 22% of people in 1962 had had a religious or mystical experience versus 49% in 2009.
Speaker: Yeah, that's weird.
Speaker: That is puzzling.
Speaker: That is extremely puzzling, especially since almost everyone in the U.S. identified as religious in the 1960s still.
Speaker: So that's interesting.
Speaker: Additionally, loads and loads of people hold at least one New Age belief.
Speaker: And this is from 2018.
Speaker: But people were polled on whether they believed in at least one of these things.
Speaker: They were asked about belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics, and the presence of spiritual energy and physical objects.
Speaker: And so many people did believe in at least one of these.
Speaker: So let me give you some interesting numbers.
Speaker: Mainline Protestants, we have 57% of them say, yes, I believe in at least one of those.
Speaker: Catholics, 70% believe in at least one of those.
Speaker: Those are both kind of interesting because those are considered like new agey beliefs that aren't really part of like traditional Christianity.
Speaker: But here's the interesting part.
Speaker: Unaffiliated people to religious nuns
Speaker: 62% believe in at least one of those.
Speaker: Atheists, only 22%.
Speaker: Agnostics, 56%.
Speaker: And people who identify as nothing in particular, 78% believe in at least one of those things.
Speaker: That's the highest category of everyone.
Speaker: So, you know, there's like that people always, you know, you always hear people say, well, I'm spiritual, but not religious.
Speaker: But like, this is a hugely increasing category.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it seems like the religious impulse might still be with us, even if society is more secular or something.
Speaker: Yeah, but I mean- Or it's being sublimated in certain other ways or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like people definitely are still experiencing, you know, some kind of what Taylor might call enchantment of the world, even if they won't like, even if they don't think like the appropriate response to that is like acknowledging it through a religion.
Speaker: Yeah, I sort of thought about this a bit while I was reading Taylor, although I found a lot of his analysis compelling.
Speaker: I still, there's this nagging thought I had.
Speaker: It just seems to me that people still are believing, yeah, believe in this kind of like kind of magical things.
Speaker: Like, is the world really as disenchanted as these great 20th and 21st century theorists say?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Well, I mean, yeah.
Speaker: So Taylor has some stuff to say about this.
Speaker: I mean, I guess, you know, we don't have enough time for me to really say exactly what he says about this.
Speaker: But I think he'd say something confusing like, yeah, it's a particular kind of like secular enchantment that's just like, you know, completely different.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because like, so for instance, take the case of manifesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So manifesting is this idea that you like just believe or want something really, really hard.
Speaker: Imagine that you have the thing.
Speaker: Eventually the universe will give you the thing.
Speaker: Also known as the secret or lucky girl syndrome.
Speaker: Wild stuff.
Speaker: I saw I saw an article, a psych article posted on Twitter recently, which said that like 30 percent of people surveyed believe this kind of stuff.
Speaker: That's absolutely incredible.
Speaker: So that's pretty.
Speaker: This is this is sort of.
Speaker: Yeah, it's all it's all very this worldly type stuff.
Speaker: So, yeah, it does.
Speaker: It does seem to be perhaps that's what Taylor could say that it is.
Speaker: It is still, you know, in the saculum, as it were.
Speaker: Yeah, I think he would say that.
Speaker: Like, there's something really interesting about, you know, the kind of spirituality that we see in, you know, religious nuns who, like, have experiences with ghosts or something.
Speaker: It's like really, it couldn't exist anywhere but, like, the modern era.
Speaker: Religious nuns as in N-O-N-E-S.
Speaker: Yeah, gosh.
Speaker: Yeah, unreligious people, not, like, actual, like, nuns, like, in an abbey, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's all the time we have for today's episode.
Speaker: Join us next time where we're going to sit back, have a drink, and talk about alcohol.
Speaker: Or two.
Speaker: Maybe two drinks.
