Space For God in The Modern
In Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries we are treated to wide ranging study of our modern mentality describing not only what it is but also how it came about. Drawing on history, philosophy and social theory, Taylor discerns a dramatic shift in how people imagine their lives today from their imaginaries of the past. The shift has been a slow but radical movement away from religion as the unifying factor for society to a society based on the individual.
Taylor is brilliant in describing the historical background for these developments, showing the slow disenchantment of the world that lead to the disembodying of the individual from their long held cosmic situation that required a new map to orient the individual in the modern world. The theories of thinker like Locke and Grotius provided the foundation to begin a fresh understanding of society, based now on natural law (which developed later into human rights). Taylor suggests that theory leads to an action that ultimately leads to a full-formed social imaginary. These common understandings are largely unconstructed and unarticulated. The particular features—in a sense—simply “show up to us.”[i] It is, in other words, the way things naturally seem to be.
What Taylor suggests is that out of a strong religiously informed and highly structured society grew a vastly different social imaginary based on the individual that resulted in four clear forms: “economy, public sphere, and a polity ruled by the people” along with human rights.[ii] Now “history can be understood, for instance, as the slow growth of a human capacity, reason, fighting against error and superstition.”[iii] This “growth entails coming to see the right moral order, the interlocking relations of a mutual benefit that we are meant to realize…”[iv]
The sharp turn to the modern is primarily mankind making its own way in the world. Taylor sees this as a stunning paradox: A people that presided over their own political birth. Today our modern social imaginary is built solely on human capacity and control without any outside or divine influence; built not on ancient foundational myths but on historical founding stories that creates room for all individuals to participate fully in all aspects of society.
However, the question that most haunted me waited to the very end to be answered: Is this turn to the modern imaginary a good development or bad? Taylor is clear that the process has not been without it faults and has elicited some harsh reactions with tragic results (including fascism and communism). Further, even with the altruistic goal (mutual benefit), the process has been slow to recognize many on the margins who (like slaves) were not yet part of the “we” in “We the People” for many years. What isn’t discussion is the fact that this moral order is based on pure reason and a vague concept of “mutual benefit,” a morality based on consensus. It begs the larger question of whether this is the best foundation for determining valuable issues of human existence, truth and justice, right and wrong. The best our modern imaginary seems to offer is “mutual benefit” which for individuals across the board can mean many things and might cause as much harm as good. As Taylor suggests, the “dark side of our modern Western social imaginary”[v] is that it “can be full of self-serving fiction and suppression” and often times “excluded and disempowered groups or imagining that their exclusion is their own doing.”[vi] Having witnessed the extremes of our modern sensibility, from exclusion and persecution to inclusion and compassion, it makes general judgments on modernity extremely difficult.
It is only at the very end that Taylor suggests that religion is not necessary absent in our strongly humanistic modern construct. As individuals and groups, the modern society allows for the personal practice of faith and disciplines, which provide opportunity to inform and define political identities. Since personal and social identities are never set or final in our modern imaginary, “there is always room for reinvasion of the political identity by the confessional.”[vii] Here I would suggest is where Christianity, by acting more like Jesus, might effectively influence our modern imaginary. Not by lording it over others, but through the process of leavening, slowly and quietly working as yeast, that the church might again influence society. Here I agree with Taylor, that in this very humanistic system, there might indeed be space for God.
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