Charles Taylor (1) (1931–)

I'm not sure if I am going to finish this. Taylor's writing would benefit from being pared down and concise. Length does not necessarily make for clarity in this case. In some ways, it's a little sad - Taylor has based this book on a lifetime of study and writing; I get the sense that he cannot bear to leave out any well-made point, any apt example, any interesting fact, or any felicitous phrase, and he has ended up overburdening this book. I gave up on the introduction, and moved on to the first chapter. He says that "we" means those "who live in the West, or the Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world." He adds that secularity extends beyond. I am an example of the secular person that Taylor is discussing, but I know that many people are not like me. Looking at less secular places, where religion still has a commanding role, does not convince me that secularism is a bad thing.

I have read several books this year on similar subjects. I am a bit tired of having modernism attacked with sanitized versions of the past - particularly since the authors can't agree on what it was like. There is an adage that in theory, there's not difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. In considering the here and now, people so often look at what is (practice), but see other times and places according to theory. Taylor seems to like the three estates idea of complementarity, where some pray, some work, and some fight, in theory to protect the other estates. In truth, then as so often now, "Oh dear me, the world is ill divided/Them that work the hardest are the least provided." * Those who work got the least, although their religion would like them to believe that the work of prayer is more important than feeding the population. Their so-called protectors have an unnerving habit of invading other people, taxing the workers to pay for their armies, dragging workers into their fights, and keeping the spoils for themselves.

In discussing why it used to be impossible not to believe in god, they keep ignoring the elephant in the room: i.e, the Latin churches' willingness to use violence to extend their reach (like the Northern Crusades) and to keep their captive audience in line (The Albigensian Crusade, the burning of heretics.) A person would have to feel very strongly to risk the violence that would descend on them for not conforming or stating outright disbelief. The churches are not alone in using violence to stifle dissent, my point is that the risks, and the lack of a way for common people to record opinions, means that we are probably more in the dark about what they thought than we would like to think. In chapter 1, Taylor does get into the justification for this, i.e., that if one member of a community failed in their religious duty, god's wrath might fall the community as a whole. This occurs in other religions as well. Ordinary citizens of the Roman Empire were said to dislike Jews because they didn't participate in communal religious celebrations, still the government didn't persecute them for it and allowed the Temple to substitute praying to their god for the good of the empire for worshiping the emperor. Still other cultures managed to live side by side with different gods and religions; perhaps polytheists were willing to worship other gods as part of a community effort. This has always struck me as a difference between the Jewish bible and the letters of Paul. In the former, the Jews as a nation were collectively responsible, whereas in the letter of Paul, the Christians lived in communities within the larger pagan world, and outside of their willingness to preach to them, but only if they wanted to listen, contented themselves with not trying to control them. This got lost, as soon as Christians got enough power to attack other people.

My second objection is that we don't actually know what common people thought in the past. When people discuss the "Medieval Mind," whose mind do they mean? Authority figures, usually. Just because the church taught something doesn't prove that people believed it. The church believed that god placed each person in their station, but this didn't stop serfs from escaping. The English Peasant's Revolt of 1381 left us the quote: "When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?" Clearly the idea that god put them in their place didn't always impress the lower classes.

I often use the Epicurean Paradox as a partial explanation for my own atheism, it boils down to: "If god can prevent evil and doesn't why call him good, if he cannot prevent evil, why call him god.?" I don't think that it requires any great education to ponder the question of evil, but it did require great courage or outrage to speak it aloud in earlier times.

I don't think that the difference between 1500 and now is quite as stark as Taylor would have it. Most people in the US believe in a god, 40% of them believe that the world is less than 10k years old, people still consult fortune tellers, cast spells, light votive candles, and otherwise pray to saints. To me, secularism denotes a lack of an official presence for religion in governing society, separation of church and state, and freedom of religion and nonreligion. I was also interested to see that Taylor blamed the mind-body problem on secularism - other people that I have read argued that is an artifact of Christianity's Greek influences, and does not occur in Judaism. Modern psychology and biology are certainly moving away from that idea, as well as the idea that only human beings have a mind.

*Jute Mill Song" by Mary Brookbank… (més)

Good book, although I’m ashamed to say a lot of it went past me. I can’t grasp plenty of complex books, and that’s fine if it’s a matter of subject matter that my education hasn’t covered and they’re written very technically. But Taylor wrote well and plainly. There were some words I needed to look up, and I only looked up some of them. But mostly, I think this book requires and deserves close attention and a bit of work on the part of the reader, and I just didn’t seem to have it in me. Laziness I guess. My loss, and not a reflection on the book...… (més)

Based on a series of lectures delivered in 1991, there is a significant difference between the text and the audio. Oscillating between dense inacessibility and plain speech, between profundidty and glib naive generalisations, this is a fantastic example of Canadian Idealism. It would be unfair and simplistic to describe this as a book in favour of reformism, or to characterise the book as saying "for the left to win it must sound like or entertain the arguments of the right." And yet there is something very Canadian about arguing that "all sides" are valid, striking a balance between all positions, and and seeking to muddle through. Of course Taylor insists he is not advocating balance, but rather going back to the original ideas of, in this case, primarily authenticity, and re-emphasising the good parts of those ideas. Reframing the argument away from 'is the quest for authenticity good or bad' to 'how can we produce good authenticity.' This is similar to the way Alain de Botton argues for good porn, instead of for or against porn, etc etc. And yet. What are the limits of this style of argument? Will we find ourselves arguing for better facism instead of being simplistically for or against facism? I remove from context, simplify and exagerrate. I know. But. There is much to be said both for and against Canadian Idealism. This book can serve as a useful place to start such a discussion.… (més)

Durante siglos, los filósofos han estado divididos acerca de la naturaleza del lenguaje. Los de tradición empirista afirman que el lenguaje es una herramienta desarrollada por los seres humanos para codificar y comunicar información. Pero esta visión, afirma Taylor, descuida el papel crucial que desempeña el lenguaje en la formación del mismo pensamiento: este no se limita a describir; constituye un significado y conforma la experiencia humana de manera definitiva. La capacidad lingüística humana no es algo que poseemos de modo innato. Primero aprendemos el lenguaje de los demás, y luego, inducidos a conversar, emerge nuestro ser individual. El lenguaje es intelectual, pero también queda representado en retratos, gestos, tonos de voz, metáforas… No reconoce fronteras entre mente y cuerpo. Al mostrar la plena capacidad de ese "animal de lenguaje", Taylor arroja luz sobre qué es, en definitiva, el ser humano.… (més)