A Post Secular Age
Adapted from “Some Post-Secularist Thoughts” posted 1/10/06
I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times. That spirit has moved on, and so should the rest of us. The culture war is a distraction from things that are far more important for us to be thinking about.
We are currently living through an era in which anything goes, in which there is no consensus about anything, and people will believe pretty much whatever they want, whatever suits them. The human mind is ingenious and endlessly inventive. It can come up with the cleverest ways to justify the most absurd ideas. All any argument needs is a splinter of truth, and with it an elaborate fortress of delusion can be built. But such delusions are not sustainable. Reality eventually asserts itself.
And so there is something in all people of good will that, despite the human proclivity toward delusion, knows the real thing when they find it. It’s just hard to find lately, so we have to look harder. And we are more likely than not to find the real thing in those elements in our culture that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time.
That's where we find the ballast that keeps things on an even keel, and one such invaluable source of ballast is the world's great religious traditions, east and west. It doesn't matter what the official representative of these traditions say or how they try to control things, because they cannot control the uncontrollable. Everything we need is available to us or is implied in these traditions; the question only remains whether we have the will to undertake the quest to find in them what will do us any good.
Too great a proportion of the world's population is now and will continue to be well informed, and will not consent be told what to believe, but they will hearken to those who have found a way to live deeply and authentically from what they have retrieved in what lies now dormant in the tradition. The new "authorities" will not be those who force their beliefs on others but those who exemplify something rich and vital and who offer a robust alternative that is plausible to the mind, inspiring to the heart, and refreshing to the soul. There are plenty of people who live like this, but you won't find them playing prominent roles in our public life--and it's rare in the churches. It's there, but you have to look hard to find it.
There will always be the people who want things in black and white, and while they can cause a lot of trouble, they are not the future. Even if their influence is strong for a while, it will be short-lived. The future lies with others who can no longer be satisfied by the rationalist/materialist straitjacket of the cultural left or the desiccated fundamentalism/dogmatism of the cultural right. They will demand something real, something that lives, that's intellectually honest and yet warm and fertile. (Fanaticism is not the kind of heat I'm talking about; it's a counterfeit of it. It's always wrong.)
The way forward requires that we look back with a Second Naïveté.1 This avoids the problems associated with Lot's Wife Syndrome2 because it is not motivated by a desire to retreat. Rather it is motivated, as was our father Abraham, by a longing to move forward into an unknowable future yet trusting in a promise whose fulfillment lies in the far distant future. We must travel lightly, but not without bringing along essential gifts that were bequeathed to us from the ancestors.
We cannot live as the ancestors lived—there is no going native in the past. But the rationalist-materialist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost. Our job now is to “remember” what they knew and we’ve forgotten, and to adapt it to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to them. We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a Second Naïveté, but we must be shrewd in our judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous.
In the future the choice will not be between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. Good religion opens up possibilities for human flourishing, and bad religion closes off possibilities. Fundamentalism and a rigid dogmatism are always bad religion, but so is the Cult of the Invisible Hand, the religion of the Neoliberals who have dominated since the 1980s the Washington Consensus.
Secularism and its rationalist-materialist presuppositions were for some centuries the spirit of the age, and it excited those who were among the age's most influential thinkers from the French philosophes through Marx, Darwin, Freud, and their followers. I don't begrudge them their day in the sun; I learned much from them. But their day is done. It's not a matter of rejecting what we have learned from them, but of integrating what they taught us into something larger and more deeply humanizing.
See also "Reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age".
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Second Naiveté is a phrase coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. It contrasts with First Naïveté, which is the condition of one who accepts his or her acculturation without question. "If it was good enough for the ancestors, it is good enough for me," says the person enframed within First Naïveté. Second Naiveté is the precondition for a retrieval that is possible only after a critical examination or even a rejection of one's acculturation. This was the Socratic project. His task was to encourage his interlocutors to examine their presuppositions—not to debunk them, but to open them up to something deeper and richer. This kind of examination is a prerequisite for any kind of mature intellectual honesty. It used to be central for what it meant to be an educated person.
Second naivete is not childish, but it requires the recovery of something childlike in us, a willingness to open up to new possibilities. It's similar to what in Zen is called 'beginner's mind'. It does not require that one give up her critical capabilities, but it does require that one suspend his skepticism long enough to open up a space for something new and vital to emerge in it. Very often what happens then is to discover that the ancestors were right all along, but now you understand it inside-out whereas in a state of First Naivete you accepted it outside-in without understanding it. Big difference.
Lot's wife symbolizes for me the human tendency, for lack of faith and hope, to resist moving into the unknown. In the story in Genesis, her husband was told by an angel to flee the city of Sodom and not look back. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. That's what happens when you cling too firmly to the past--you retain the form but without the life. She's in the same category as those among the Israelites who fled with Moses into the Sinai wilderness but who wanted to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt: better to be a slave and eat than to be free and hungry. Same with Cypher in The Matrix: better to be comfortable and deluded than deprived and clear-eyed in the Desert of the Real.
I see our condition as Americans as a similar wandering in the wilderness, i.e., in a terra incognita not knowing what lies ahead. But it is not we who have gone out into the wilderness, but rather the wilderness has come to us--whether we choose to be in it or not. As the early Christian monks went out into the wilderness to find God, they found first they had to wrestle with demons. So it is with us—just look around you. And so while there is little in this wilderness to give the soul sustenance, we must not retreat, but rather we must find the kind of primal trust, like that of the great Patriarch Abraham, that enables us, as it did him, to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the primal hope that impossible promises will yet be fulfilled.