Episode #240 ... Varieties of Religion Today (Charles Taylor)

Hello everyone! I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis to help keep a show like this going. Hope you love it today. So when Charles Taylor writes a book in 2002 called The Varieties of Religion Today, it's a reference to a book written a hundred years before that by the philosopher William James called The Varieties of Religious Experience. Now this book by James has become world famous for a few big things that he does in it, one of which is going to be him laying out a famous description right near the beginning of the book of what a religious experience even is. William James says essentially look, if we're talking about religion, go into church on Sunday and get in a sermon delivered to you by a pastor. That's wonderful and all, but that's not the core of what it is to have a religious experience. That's not what religion really is. Religion, he says, is something that goes on in the heart of an individual. It's a personal experience when an individual feels a connection to whatever it is they call the divine. And when they feel this transcendent moment connected to something that's beyond this world, he's saying that's where a religious experience really goes on. It's certainly not in some building down the street where a bunch of people meet up and like to sing songs together. In fact, most religions start in the same way James says. There's some religious genius that comes along, you know, some individual that gains some really powerful spiritual insight. And as they do their thing, they start to attract attention. They get followers and then groups of sympathizers and eventually enough time passes that in order to spread the message of this spiritual breakthrough they had, the story has to get retold, which means it gets watered down. Eventually it needs to get written down, eventually turned into a doctrine, a doctrine that has to apply to everybody now in some way. I mean, eventually this goes on long enough. If your religion is really successful, you can even have people preaching it to lost human beings and strip malls all over the world. In fact, in some circles, I think that's when they'd say, you made it, my boy, you made it. In other words, to William James, any institutional or public form that a religion takes can easily become a distortion of the actual religious insights at the base of it. And more than that, just in practice, organized religion often becomes a site for corruption or for abuse. For James, religion even sometimes becomes corporate or tribal. It becomes a site for all the things that make people skeptical of mass religion when they see it produce bad things. But again, to William James, a person doesn't even need this mass form of religion to be able to connect to God anyway. That, again, is something they can do completely on their own through, again, one of these personal phenomenological connections to the divine in their own experience. Now, this whole view that this personal experience is what religion is at its core, the way Charles Taylor sees it has become an extremely common way that people see their relationship to religion today. He thinks William James absolutely nailed it when it comes to predicting the ways people of our time are going to be thinking about it. But aside from giving him all the credit in the world here for crystallizing this way of thinking about religion, he thinks all things considered, it's a pretty inaccurate, overly narrow view of organized religion that ignores some really important pieces of how religion functions, pieces that would help a lot of modern people to be aware of if they wanted to understand their own relationship to religion better or even their lack of a relationship with one. By the end of this episode, we'll understand why he thinks this take from James, doesn't quite capture all of it, and we'll understand the picture he paints of a very unique set of problems that he thinks modern people have to navigate when trying to form their views on religion these days, because making these decisions for people alive today is different than it's ever been for anyone that came before us. See, in the same way we talked about last episode, where there's this evolution of the different ways people have viewed the self and its relationship to morality, well, there's also an evolution of the function that religion has served in people's lives over time. Charles Taylor is going to trace this evolution as a part of this book and then describe the spiritual predicament that it puts us all in. Anyway, I say all this just to give you a heads up that what follows from here is not going to be an argument from Taylor about how you should be living your life. It's not a prescription from him, but more of a description of the many sides that there are to what religion is that hopefully after we talk about them can help people understand why they view religion the way they do. And I've thought long and hard about where the best place is to start with all this, and I think I want to start with a question that all of us have to give an answer to at some point in our lives. It's a famous question presented by William James in the original book. The question is, should I live as though there's something transcendent beyond this world, that even though we can't directly access it, it nonetheless gives meaning and order to the things in this world, an approach to life that allows for a transcendence, as it said. I mean, as far as religious questions go, this is pretty basic, but William James thinks the way you answer this is going to define some important things about how your life turns out. And there's two fairly common ways to answer it, he says, both of which are valid. But while neither of these ways of thinking is going to be wrong to Charles Taylor or William James, there will be a lot more to say about the details of both of these and how they're lived by people. The first way to answer this question is to say that we don't need to believe in unverifiable transcendent explanations for things when we have perfectly good explanations that are rooted in the imminent. To explain this with a little less philosophical terminology, let me put it into a modern character you may have seen in your life, a person critical of organized religion and all the problems they see it create. This kind of person may say transcendence, huh? How about no, no, I'm not going to believe in some fairy tale just because somebody else decided to. Why do I got to believe in anything beyond this world when I could just admit the pieces of this world that I'm ignorant of? Look, it is not just wrong to believe in stuff like this transcendent thing that lacks any real evidence for it. But more than that, it is an absolute coward's move to not be able to face reality as it is without some comforting transcendent story that you have about it. This whole attitude is often called the agnostic veto that William James is describing in this section of the book. Charles Taylor calls this way of thinking a closed stance, meaning closed to the possibility of transcendence. It's essentially a refusal to believe in transcendent things on principle. See to this person, what reason do we have to believe in any of this stuff we have no evidence for? Listen, God is not the hide-and-seek champion of the universe, okay? He's not proven a point by not revealing himself. He doesn't exist. This is a story. Come up with any BS you need to justify that, but I'm not going to waste my time dreaming about other worldly things when this world is enough as it is. In that last sentence I just said there to Charles Taylor, becomes a cornerstone of how this kind of person sees their moral formation throughout their life. If this person can't find meaning in something transcendent, they'll have to find meaning in their life through immanence, meaning this world imminently unfolding right in front of you. That's what I'm going to derive my values from, from the things that are already happening that we all already care about. And this way of thinking will often manifest in purely secular conversations about ideals that are very familiar to us in modern times, human rights and dignity, the role of government, justice, animal rights, the environment, no shortage of conversations to be had pulling only from this world for our values. And again, when this perspective is done in a way that isn't excessive, more on that later, for both Taylor and James this is a totally acceptable response to this original question. But there's another way to answer this question that's valid as well, and it's the one William James decides to go with during his lifetime. See, being both a psychologist and a pragmatic philosopher, he's thinking about all the ways it's possible to answer this question honestly without giving in to superstition. And he says, "The very fact that I'm the kind of creature that's so drawn to this idea that there is something transcendent beyond this world, that may be justification enough for me to explore something like religion that talks about it so much." Look, even from a purely scientific perspective, that drive inside me towards this kind of thing is real. It is a part of the kind of creature I am. And even if for no other reason than just learning more about this drive inside me, could exploring a belief in the transcendent be something that ends up valuable to me? But here's the catch, William James says. The tricky part about all this is that there are some experiences we have as people where in order to fully access them, they require you to be participating in something that you give yourself over to. An example of this totally outside of religion could be that you can only really know if you can trust someone by trusting them. Because if you don't trust someone, you know, if you always have shields put up, tracking them on their phone, constantly checking to see if they're deceiving you, well, then you're not actually trusting the person there. Trust is never something that can actually be built until you become vulnerable enough to allow it to. In other words, there's kinds of knowledge that require the participation of the knower in something for the knower to be able to receive that knowledge. And William James is going to make the argument that this could be the case when it comes to the transcendent. I mean, maybe once we make the right set of commitments, the evidence for the transcendent starts to become more visible to us. Now, the modern critic of religion from before may say back to James here. Well, how convenient, William James? I mean, what is you wanting it to be true? Have anything to do with whether or not it is true? I mean, what you really sound like here, dude, is a desperate monkey that when it encountered the reality that the universe is actually meaningless, you're feeling a longing for your your transcendent security blanket that makes you feel better about it. In fact, that's all that religion's ever been for people throughout our history. How are you any different here? One of the very interesting lines of thought in this book by Charles Taylor is that he tells someone who gives this kind of criticism to be careful of the modern bias they're projecting on religion there that really didn't exist in people's thinking until very recently. Again, doing extensive work in tracing back the history of religion and how it actually functioned in people's lives and Western Christianity. Charles Taylor says, look, even if it is true that modern people face this argument that everything around them is meaningless. And even if some people do find themselves drawn towards religion to help get rid of the despair that can sometimes come along with that, this is still nowhere near how most people have experienced religion throughout history. People weren't drawn to religion in the past because it was something that made them feel better. No, transcendent meaning was so baked into the way that everybody viewed everything that you go back to certain points in history. And if someone had the thought, what if everything's meaningless? It just in practice wouldn't have been a thought that was very persuasive to them. And so many things about the way society was set up would have instantly pulled their thinking in the opposite direction. For example, take a Dominican monk living in some medieval form of Christian society. It was entirely possible for this person to have the thought arise in their head that maybe everything is meaningless and that all this devotion and prayer I'm doing is actually just a complete waste of time. But it is also very likely that, given the culture that person lived in, which from birth has framed everything about their life in terms of the self-evident cosmic meaning that's embedded into everything, the thought that everything is meaningless doesn't even feel to them like a philosophical position that's worth losing sleep over. It's just effectively not very persuasive given the tools they already used to make sense of the world. It'd be like telling somebody today that the whole world's built on the back of a turtle or something. I mean, to somebody with all the common tools we have of modern science and philosophy, just saying a modern person's probably not losing much sleep over that, having nightmares about turtles taken over the world. And that's the point to Charles Taylor. When everything about your life is structured around such a different type of cosmology, this monk, when he has that thought cross his mind, he's likely to frame it in terms that makes sense within a universe that assumes meaning. His experience will be something like, "Oh, that thought I just had about how nothing really means anything. Well, this is likely just a bit of temptation I'm experiencing right now. A thought that runs the risk of distracting me from the true obvious moral path that I'm on." See, the possibility that everything's meaningless just doesn't eat at this person the same way it does a modern person. And Charles Taylor's going to say that's in large part due to the sociological or structural role that religion played at the point in history this person's living. This is a very important piece of what religion is at any given time. And Charles Taylor thinks it's going to be essential for us to do the work to understand. Because when you do that, then this argument from the critic that religion's just a transcendent security blanket for people, you start to realize how incomplete that is as a description. You also start to realize how incomplete the William James take on religion is from the beginning of the episode that religion's something entirely personal. And to get started on presenting a more full picture of the way religion has evolved over the years, Taylor breaks the history of all this down into three distinct forms that religion has taken, each one of these serving a different role to the people that were practicing it. Depending on the era we're talking about, he says religion can be classified as either paleo-derkheim religion, neo-derkheim religion, or post-derkheim religion. We'll talk about all three of these, but first things first, derkheim there, is a reference to Emil derkheim. He's the guy that's often credited as being the first sociologist that ever existed. Now, Taylor's using his name here, because if William James' definition of religion is incomplete, then derkheim's yet another brilliant thinker in this area whose definition of religion can help us understand it deeper. Now, spoiler alert, even derkheim's views are not going to fully account for what religion has turned into. But still to Taylor, this line of thinking from derkheim is incredibly useful for building up our understanding of all this. Derkheim's big claim is going to be that religion's not something only going on at an individual level. Religion is also, importantly, something that helps constitute social solidarity. Meaning, religion provides a level of shared meaning, shared priorities, rights, and ceremonies. Religion is something that binds otherwise individual people together into a "we." You could say religion is something like the glue that binds a society together. Now, derkheim says all this, and Taylor thinks it's interesting. And like the take from William James, it certainly captures something about how religion has functioned in the past. But again, Charles Taylor thinks religion is something entirely different for people in today's world. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. So daylight savings time just happened. And having shorter days is one of the several things that piles up for people around this time of year when they start to feel like they have a tougher time mentally during certain seasons more than others. 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You can switch your virtual location to watch all kinds of entertainment, and you can access your usual services like you're at home when you're abroad. With Threat Protection Pro, though, that's the service they provide, you can scan files for viruses during downloads and block ads and malicious links. Their dark web monitor alerts you if your login credentials are discovered by hackers. Not to mention one NordVPN account works on up to 10 different devices, all of this for just the price of a cup of coffee per month. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com/filoethis. Our link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee, the link is in the podcast episode description box. And now, back to the podcast. To get there, let's first talk about how it's changed over the years, though. Remember, there's paleo, neo, and poster kind versions of it. And let's start with the form that Religion took mostly earlier on in history, what he calls Paleo-Dirkheim Religion. In a Paleo-Dirkheim Religious Society, to be someone participating in most meaningful things you can do in that society was equivalent to participating in a religion. What he means is, you know, if you're going to get married in one of these earlier societies, for example, you're not going down to City Hall and getting a marriage license and negotiating that whole process with the government. No, in the Paleo-Dirkheim function of religion, to get married is to participate in a religious ceremony called a marriage, where it's in the presence of a religious leader who has the power vested in them to bind the two of you together. In other words, it's very important in societies like this that your marriage is something that's ratified at a church, not a courthouse. Another example, you go to school in a society like this, and from the content of the lessons that are being taught in that school to the rules you have to follow while you're in it, all of these things would be organized around a view of the universe that's taken from Scripture. It's not uncommon for societies like this to require the people living in them to be members of the church. It's not uncommon for people to be exiled if they don't participate in religious tradition enough. There's many more examples of these kinds of things, but you get the point probably, the sociological or structural role that religion played in this kind of society is extremely integrated, where to do almost anything assumes the validity of an embedded religion, and so to even live in a Paleo-Durkheim society is to be participating in a religion. But as time goes on, Taylor says, religion starts to look like something very different. Neo-Durkheim religion is going to start to emerge. Like we talked about last episode, as our view of the self transforms slowly into something that's much more individual, self-governing, but that throughout most of history it's still always rooted to an external moral order that binds people together. Well, similarly, Charles Taylor talks about the modern United States as an example of Neo-Durkheim religion, a society where religion is still a part of what unifies people in it, broadly speaking, but the actual participation in the religion is not required of people as much as it was before. This is the kind of society where there's still in God we trust on the currency. There's still one nation under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, but outside of that there's also plenty of ways for a person to go throughout their life in the modern United States where they don't need to participate in religious tradition. Again, this is Neo-Durkheim religion now instead of Paleo-Durkheim. And the post-Durkheim example of this, well, it's exactly what it sounds like in the name. History goes on, our view of the self continues to evolve over time, and as it turns even more into this personal individual focus where we choose our own values, you know, personal expression becomes the most important thing to people, eventually we get to a point today where the function of religion has moved into something that is post what Durkheim thought religion was, where in some places, like say in modern Europe, Taylor says, we're now in a spot where being part of a society doesn't require you to participate in any religious tradition or to use religious language at all. Religion's function then for a growing number of people today becomes almost entirely a personal choice that's to be made by an individual. People participate in religion as much or as little as they want to in these societies, and they do it all to whatever degree they personally decide it's appropriate to. And for Charles Taylor, this trend emerges alongside other things that behave in the same personalized a la carte sort of way, a rise in consumerism as a lifestyle, where it becomes more and more common for someone to go down to the store and buy a toaster, and then to think that that toaster says something important about who they are deep down inside. How about the rise of personal fashion, where every little thing I put on is making some statement about me and what I want to say, certainly some very deep messaging there. Point is, this trend going on towards what he calls expressive individualism and the age of authenticity. Well, why wouldn't this all expand to the way that people think about the religious approach? I mean, why wouldn't religion become something that's as a la carte to us as what kind of watch you're going to wear or something? Now, consider that this is the foundation that a growing number of people are using to decide what their relationship to religion is going to be in the modern world. And don't take this, as Charles Taylor saying, this is how everybody's looking at it. I mean, don't worry. Don't worry. There's still plenty of people out there that see religion in the paleo and neo Durkheim ways as well. Identity politics, nationalism, cults of personality, all these different sociological functions of religion coexist to some degree. But there's a growing number of people because of the rise of this expressive individualism that treat religion as though it's simply a personal choice because of religions not mandatory. And ultimately, I'm the one to decide where religion begins and ends in my life. Then a lot of things start to make sense. No wonder William James' description of religion sounds right to me, that it's just a personal experience with what I consider to be the divine. And no wonder, Charles Taylor would say, when you remove the community element of religion, no wonder people in the modern world sometimes settle in their lives for a connection to religion that is superficial in comparison to religion at other points in history. So many examples of this going on. People today will say things like, I'm spiritual, but not religious. You know, a thing to say that's an absolute hallmark of our era, Charles Taylor thinks. But first of all, what exactly does any of that they just said even really mean? And second, what totally personal choice did they just make that supposedly grounds that kind of statement? Another example, people will go to church once a week. They'll do basically no devotional work with their time away from church. Ah, but don't worry, I've decided individually that this is the amount of work it takes for someone to be a good Christian. Look, me and God have a personal connection. Alright, he knows that I know what he's talking about deep down in my heart somewhere. When you don't have an actual tightly knit community of people that are all committed to doing something difficult in the name of the same ideal. In other words, when real religious community doesn't really matter anymore, because it's only what an individual person feels that matters. Charles Taylor is going to say, think of all the problems this potentially creates for specifically a modern person. You know, it's easy to think that the most authentic way I can do this stuff is to only listen to myself. But think of how easy it becomes, for example, for you to make excuses for yourself. How easy does it become to skip church for a couple weeks or a couple years, simply because you decided it wasn't necessary? How easy does it become to rationalize your own bad behavior? Because, you know, you're not a theologian, but apparently your personal opinion about what scripture says that's enough to justify anything you think is appropriate. For Charles Taylor to believe religion is something that only exists in the heart of an individual, misses out on so many ways that a religious community helps us interpret our lives in a way where we're not deceiving ourselves and then holds us accountable to an ideal greater than just our own subjective opinion. There's even more you miss out on for Charles Taylor when you remove the religious community. How about all the times where participation in a religious group setting is the thing that leads someone to the very divine experiences we're talking about in the first place? You know, sometimes festivals, ceremonies, religious rituals like a wedding. Sometimes these are the moments for a person where they find a connection to a religious experience deeper. Sometimes it's talking to or even arguing with other people that ends up making you understand your own religious approach in a deeper way. And by the way, crucial point to mention here for Charles Taylor is if we've been talking so far about the religious form of this, you know, the form this takes if you're someone more on the transcendent side of that question we began with, we'll understand this also applies for Taylor to the person that gets their values from an imminence based approach as well. They too run the risk of endlessly justifying their own bias or getting stuck in a self referential loop. And similarly, if they don't have the difficult task that they do with a community of people that holds them accountable to a higher cause, personal development for this person, it's just going to be much harder in practice to do honestly. Consider how a scientist, for example, needs a community of other scientists all working towards a similar goal and all holding each other accountable to an ideal of truth. Consider how an activist needs a community of people committed to a higher cause that hold them accountable to the cause. I mean, how easy is it to call yourself an activist and never do anything that's even difficult for you. So either way, whether your approach to life is religious or secular, just making decisions on your own in this area is a really good way to stay comfortable, not grow much and spend your time mostly making excuses for yourself. It forces us to ask the question, does this become a trap that we have to watch out for, especially as people living in the modern world? Does finding one of these religious or secular communities that challenges us become essentially mandatory for anyone taking their moral development seriously? But someone could say back to all this. Well, that's all very easy to say, Charles Taylor, but you've described this so far as a set of structural conditions that we're born into. So what exactly are people supposed to do then? Sure, maybe William James is ignoring how important the religious community is a bit too much. But his criticism of institutionalized religion, that is a real concern. I mean, where are people supposed to go if they can't trust these mass forms of connection anymore? Well, credit where credit is due. This is certainly one of the unique problems we face these days. And Charles Taylor would say in practice what people are doing is metabolizing this desire for something bigger into things that they don't often see as religious. You know, people will feel this desire for a connection to a higher cause, and then they'll go download a meditation app in that moment, or they'll go to a yoga class, weakened retreat or something. The only problem with that being for Charles Taylor that these kinds of things often become cheap, modern substitutes that don't provide the same things a real committed practice does. For example, when something like a yoga class isn't really all that difficult and doesn't really call upon people in it to connect to something beyond the self too much, again, this becomes a site where modern people often settle for a cheap kind of pseudo spiritual experience, that the mistake is the pinnacle of what's possible in this area because it's just the most they've ever demanded of themselves. But of course, all the rationalizations available after the fact of, you know, this is spirituality to me. I decide what that is. At least I'm doing way better than all these other people I can point to. It's yet another modern trap that becomes very easy for people to fall into. But if all this weren't bad enough, as the spiritual predicament that we're in, there's another modern problem we have to live with today that runs all the way down to the strength of our beliefs themselves. We live in a time where belief or unbelief in the existence of the divine is as fragile as it's maybe ever been before in history. What Charles Taylor means by this is, to be someone answering this question we asked at the beginning of the episode, should I explain things in terms of transcendence or eminence? We live in a time that is so structurally pluralistic for Charles Taylor, meaning there's so many different valid ways of viewing reality that we can be exposed to, that this makes belief on either side of this question something that's very fragile in practice. For example, picture a doctor who also happens to be a Christian. Now, that person lives in a world today where they will no doubt have friends and colleagues and patients that they totally respect. They have no problem with them. But these people happen to be atheist when it comes to their metaphysical views. These are people that don't believe in any form of transcendence like the Christian does. And yet as a doctor, this person still talks to these people, they treat them. There's no question to them, these are genuinely good people who they admire. And Taylor's point is, the Christians left to wonder here, more so than ever before perhaps, am I just fooling myself when it comes to my religion? Am I just conceptually confused about something that's very important here on the eminence view of things that I haven't considered yet? Now, in the same way, an atheist framing things entirely in terms of eminence, they too coexist with people who they deeply respect, who are religious. And similarly, it is more possible than ever for this person to have the eminent side of things do find it explaining most things in their life. But then a loved one dies, for example. Maybe they have some profound experience they can't really explain in purely secular terms. We live in a time where that atheist can look around them and they see people they respect who believe in viable alternatives that involve transcendence. So the atheist is left to wonder more than ever before, am I maybe missing something important on the transcendent side of things that explains this feeling inside me? Now, of course, it's possible to dive head first into either side of this. You know, declare yourself one or the other, label the other side as stupid and misguided, and then, you know, bask in your hot tub of moral superiority for the rest of your life. But again, for Charles Taylor, the world is something that's structurally pluralistic these days if you're not basking in a hot tub. You know, to be someone alive today is likely to be someone who can relate to this doubt that crops up in their head far more than that Dominican monk from our example earlier. So what this means is not only is answering this question from William James, not just a one time thing where you decide on eminence or transcendence, and then you call it a life. But more than that, getting caught in this place, where you sort of oscillate between an eminence view and a transcendence view, or between a closed view and an open view, as Charles Taylor puts it, it's on this cusp between belief and unbelief that more and more modern people are starting to live their lives. Taylor says in the book, "James is our great philosopher of the cusp. He tells us more than anyone else about what it's like to stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there. He describes a crucial site of modernity and articulates the decisive drama enacted there." And when we consider everything he said so far about the lack of real religious communities, about this over focus on personal religious experience, about the fragility of modern religious belief at bottom, you can really start to see a picture of the set of problems we have to navigate when it comes to answering this question from the beginning. People are not only having a harder time getting to a deeper place of religious connection because of all the hurdles in their way, but they're also finding it harder to hold on to that belief for any real length of time. And if what we need, ultimately, is a real community of people that we commit ourselves to in a disciplined way, then living on the cusp between belief and unbelief is something that will very likely prevent you from ever committing yourself enough to something to see the benefits that being a part of the group can provide to you. These cross pressures, as Taylor calls them, that are created by this belief and unbelief or switching between, this is yet another uniquely modern problem that someone wanting to develop themselves in this way has to find a way to contend with. So what does this mean for the modern person then? Well, again, far from offering a prescription on how you should be living, this is not what Charles Taylor's doing in this book. I think it's safe to say that he'd say it's wise to consider the pitfalls of the situation we're in. Try to understand what religion has turned into and then try to avoid the common traps. Pick a path that genuinely challenges you, whether that's religious or secular, doesn't matter. Make sure that path is aimed at something greater than just you and some preference you have. And then make sure to stick to that path long enough, with a group of people really holding you accountable, that you can actually see the benefits of being someone that's committed themselves to that path. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this episode. Really looking forward to the Patreon discussion in the comment section on this one. Thanks in advance to everyone there who participates and all the effort you put in. Thank you.