Taylor's 'A Secular Age' Part 3

Evolving Social Imaginaries

The great temptation is simply to drift, “lower our voices,” settle for what we have, we are; say it is too late for change, we lack the resources, all we can do is keep our heads above the wave, treading water. History has made us, we cannot remake ourselves. To say this is to say that we are not the heirs, merely, but prisoners of our past thoughts, that we cannot break through them and be free, even when we recognize their delusive aspects.

If this is so, then we must perish, feeding on recognized falsehood, our fate the fate of our exposed, exploded theories. … At any rate, history never rests, never leaves alone the thing it makes; and there are signs that history, having made ours a great nation, may now be in the process of unmaking us—unless we can tap some energies for our own renewal.

It is the scale of this task that has frightened men, made them withdraw to Nixon’s faded standard. But we have no safe haven of escape—least of all there. If our liberal system is coming apart at the seams, it is not because of “subversive” nibbling moths and underminers. It is because the seams, of themselves, will not hold.

Garry Wills,. Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, 1969

Wills was remarkably prescient in writing this in 1969—before Watergate, before Reagan, before the Iraq War, before the financial collapse of 2008, before the election of Donald Trump. All of that is implicitly predicted in these few paragraphs. It remains to be determined whether we can find the resources to reverse the process of our unmaking. Are there energies into which we can tap “for our own renewal”. I believe there are, but they are buried and must be uncovered.

In Part 1 in this series, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about the social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but I want to develop it further in this post. Understanding its implications reinforces the idea that the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is provisional: humans did not always experience/imagine the world as they do now, and they are not likely to experience/imagine it in the future the way we do now. There will be continuities but the discontinuities will be more significant.

So the “imaginary” is a fluid, evolving, dynamic interactive process between what is given in our acculturation and how we interact and work with the world in which we are immersed. In our work we transform it, and in our transforming it our way of experiencing and imagining it evolves. Some of us are more active in shaping our experience of the world, and others of us are more passive. So in our life together, a lot depends on who are the most active “workers”.

The world we live in depends on which factions within a society do the most “work” in shaping our collective imagination about what’s most salient, i.e., what gets filtered out or pushed into the background and what gets foregrounded. Are the most influential shapers of our imaginaries, for instance, engineers, or are they poets and mystics? It matters because each gives us a very different world, and the world that they give is the world that “programs” us as children and sets the rules for how we do our work. So capabilities that we each have in us get foregrounded or backgrounded depending on which help us to fit best in the imaginary bequeathed to us.

As outlined in Part 2, the Enlightenment rationalists played that foregrounding/backgrounding role in the 1700s, and the industrial capitalists played it in the 1800s. The technocrats¹ played it in the 1900s, and anarcho-capitalism is playing it now since the 1980s. ²

The poets and mystics pushed back against the engineers for a while in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but the engineers have taken over since then. When was the last time you read a poem?³

The techno/anarcho-capitalists have been playing the most significant role in shaping our experience of reality since at least WWII, and the last time there was any real pushback to it was the 1960s⁴—at the time Wills was writing. There was some hope then among the “kids” that the “technocracy” could be resisted and something more human could emerge as an alternative. They were fighting for an imaginary where poets and mystics would have a say.

So It was so dispiriting at that time that the technocracy won in 1968—and it hasn’t looked back.⁵ Both parties in the U.S. since then have accepted technocratic imaginary as the only one that has legitimacy. But it’s an imaginary that is breaking American society apart at the seams. It already was doing that in 1960s, and it has just gotten worse since then.

Our current imaginary is fragile, unstable, and it won't last. So where does whatever replaces it come from? It seems that our creative class has become incapable of thinking in utopian terms anymore—if the dystopian movies released on Netflix are any measure.⁶ So, as Wills put it, we—

drift, “lower our voices,” settle for what we have, we are; say it is too late for change, we lack the resources, all we can do is keep our heads above the wave, treading water.

And the technocracy moves ahead unimpeded.

My focus here on Taylor is rooted in my conviction that understanding how the premodern imaginary morphed into the modern imaginary can help us to understand how imaginaries change, and about how the human imagination quite literally changes reality--both for better and worse.

We assume that we now understand the world more clearly and more accurately than our ancestors did, and we do understand the mechanics of the material world better than they. We also tend to believe, if we are the typical secular modern, that everything our ancestors believed about the spiritual world is superstition and delusion. Some of it was, but much of it wasn't. Knowing how to discern the difference is a new skill we shall have to learn in the future (See Note 2), but it's not a skill that the "buffered selves" can be much good at. Because their condition as buffered is one that filters out the "data" that must be discerned and evaluated. No data to work with, no possibiliity to develop a skill to evaluate it.

Our current "postmodern" imaginaries give us no robust sense of future possibility because there is nothing enframed within them that is deeply worthy of our aspiration.⁷ There are all manner of things to which we say 'No", but nothing to which we can say a deeply felt collective 'Yes'. The postmodern moment is essentially a negating one. The cultural Right says No to everything Liberals want in the hope that it might preserve what has already been lost.⁸ And the cultural Left says No to everything in traditional and customary culture without understanding the consequences, i.e, how their negation works hand in hand with capitalism to wreak a domicide in heartland America that throws people into anomie and ontological dizziness.

I have deep respect for the stance "I don't know", so long as it is a stance of radical openness—what Keats called ‘negative capability’ (look it up). And I respect the stance of embracing a refusal of hope when the hope being refused is not hope at all but a kind of bogus optimism that finds the most trivial entertainments and projects "exciting" as seems de rigeur for members of our pop and business cultures.

At best this refusal of hope is transitional, but too often I think there's a way that people get stuck in its negating temper. This is especially true when a snarky, negating oppositionalism becomes a shibboleth of sophistication. God forfend that we should say or do anything with sincerety—‘cringe’.⁹ But this is a symptom of our illness and our deep alienation. Seeing through what is bogus is an important step, but it is pointless if it does not open up possibilities to see more clearly and to get a better grip on reality.

My sense of hope inclines me to believe that at some point something positive, something worthy of our collective affirmation and aspiration will emerge, and with it a new grand narrative and a new imaginary. I suspect that while aspects of this imaginary will be completely new in the sense of 'currently not imagined', other aspects of it will involve a retrieval of forgotten things that were once imagined by our ancestors. I suspect that one of the things that will be retrieved is a deep sense of the "personal" --the "Thouness"--of the Deep Real. I would at least like to argue for that as a possibility, or at least that if Christians have anything to contribute to a future social cosmic and social imaginary, it's this.

***

For Taylor our social and cosmic imaginaries are the pre-reflective sense we have of our world, its sense of conventional reality, its myths, norms, and practices, in all their taken-for-grantedness. Although in traditional societies these imaginaries tend to be static, in the sense that they don't change significantly over relatively long stretches of time, the imaginary of the societies shaped by Latin Christendom, has undergone very significant transformations starting around the turn of the first millennium C. E. and accelerating over the last five hundred years. Taylor's project in A Secular Age is to trace out this "long march" toward our current secular age over the last millennium and to understand the complex factors that caused it. 

The social imaginary consists of the generally shared background understandings of society, which make it possible for it to function as it does. It is 'social' in two ways: in that it is generally shared, and in that it is about society. But there are also generally shared understandings about other things as well, and these are 'social' only in the first way. Among them is the ensemble of ways we imagine the world we live in. 

And just as the social imaginary consists of the understandings which make sense of our social practices, so the "cosmic imaginary" makes sense of the ways in which the surrounding world figures in our lives: the ways, for instance, that it figures in our relgious images and practices, including explicit cosmological doctrines; in the stories we tell about the other lands and other ages; in our ways of marking the seasons and the passage of time; in the places of "nature' in our moral and/or aesthetic sensibility; and in our attempts to develop a 'scientific' cosmology, if any. (323)

What I’m calling the “long march” is a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the populations;. . .  or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base. . . . Or alternatively, a set of practices in the course of their slow development and ramifications gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary. . . . The result in all these cases was a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies, and thus of the world in which we live. (176)

He wants to distinguish imaginary from theory. Everyone lives with a socially shared imaginary, not everyone lives with a theory. The movement from one imaginary to another, like the one that happened in the West from premodern to modern, and from modern to whatever it is we have now (because it is no longer modern) is a movement that started with theory but then came to permeate social practice. The movement, the “long march”, traced starts from the classical/medieval imaginaries based on Platonic/Aristotelian ideas of form and teleology, and the hierarchical complementarity that shaped both social and cosmic imaginaries in the ancient and medieval worlds to our modern moral order based on instrumental reason and utilitarian mutual benefit.

People tend not to realize how profound the changes are when they are living through them. They tend to focus on the continuities rather than the discontinuities, but when the discontinuities take hold, the imaginary changes. In more intense periods of social change, there is often what has been called a generation gap. Some of this is superficial in the sense of changes in fashion that older people may not be attuned to, but some of it is deeper and contributes structurally to changes in the imaginary. The older generation is shaped by older practices and ideas that shaped the imaginary into which they were acculturated as children, and the younger generation, while deeply influenced by the imaginary of the older generations, is also shaped by new practices and ideas that introduce discontinuities that the older generation feels uncomfortable with.

In traditional societies there may be between generations differences of opinion and temperament when it comes to dealing with certain issues, like war. (Youngsters for it, elders against it.) But there is no generation gap in the modern sense. In traditional societies the wisdom of the elders counts for something because their greater experience in a relatively stable world retains its relevance. In a rapidly changing world the experience of the elders counts for little because their knowledge has become largely obsolete and experience irrelevant. Adaptability to the rapidly changing new is prized, and that is a capability exhibited mostly by the young.

So in the next posts I want to follow some of Taylor's effort to trace the changes in the social and cosmic imaginaries of Latin Christendom, from the hierarchical, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of classical antiquity to the hierarchical, personal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Latin medieval period, to the flattened, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Enlightenment rationalists and the Liberal Order they have bequeathed to us. 

My reason for doing so is not academic but existential. Reread the Wills quote in the epigraph. Our making or unmaking is at stake as the old thing breaks apart at the seams. Whether as conservatives contend this could have been avoided is not at issue. The Liberal Order has served us well in so many important ways. The question now is about what we bring with us as we go forward.

And one thing, to me at least, seems clear: As our imaginary changed so quickly, especially in the last 150 years, we adapted too thoughtlessly. In doing so we have left behind treasures we must take the time now to retrieve. This is not an exercise in nostalgia but rather and exercise in remembering what in our haste we have forgotten. I contend that in such remembering we might find the energies for our renewal.

But for our purposes here it will be enough to define the technocracy as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of science, there is no appeal. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969 p. 7-8.

1. The technocracy is the kind of society that gave us the best and brightest that led us into Vietnam and Iraq and the financial catastrophe in 2008. They brag about how “facts based” and “data-driven” they are while they lack even a shred of wisdom in evaluating what is salient in those data—see Note 2.

2. There is present throughout these developments over the last three or four hundred years the dominance of “instrumental reason”, which is an essential human faculty for helping us to navigate in the world. It’s the source of what the Greeks called ‘phronesis’ or practical wisdom/prudence. The other kind of reason the Greeks called ‘nous’ plays no role here.

Nous for the Greeks and the thinkers they influenced was (is?) an innate human faculty that when exercised enables humans to cognize Truth or the Good as a transcendental value and in doing so to open up the possibility to grow in wisdom or sophia. Socrates’ mission was to midwife the birth of nous his interlocutors so that they might awaken to the transcendent Good.

Sophia for the ancients was the most important kind of wisdom. Its pursuit is what philo/sophia was all about. It isn’t anymore. Why? Because the exercise of nous/sophia was crowded out by the dominance of phronesis/instrumental reason during the modern period. Use it or lose it. The preoccupation with technological advancement for its own sake inclined the leading figures of modernity to feel little need for sophia—too subjective, too woo woo. Sophia doesn’t help you land on the moon.

Phronesis doesn’t ask the question “Is it Good?” It only asks the question “Will it work?” Does Dr. Frankenstein think to ask whether it’s a good idea to build his monster—or what the consequences of his succeeding might be? Never occurs to him. Dr. Frankenstein is not an evil character in Shelley’s novel, but a foolish, shallow one.

Asking and answering the question “Is it good?” is a job for sophia. Is sophia playing such a role in determining the uses of AI or biotechnologies? Is it even playing a significant role in bioethics and business ethics? How can it if nobody has it or values it anymore? Utility is all.

3. I know—music and the lyrics of some gifted singer/song writers can play such role. There’s some nous at work at work there—maybe more explicity in figures like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen—but many others as well. It’s probably the main thing these days that prevents our collective soul from completely shriveling up.

4. I recently came across this quote from My Dinner with Andre. Near the end of the film Andre says—

In fact, it seems to me quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left almost to remind them that there was once a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and that soon no one will really remember that life existed on the planted.  My Dinner with Andre, 1981

5. I’m not saying that the Democrats offered anything better. Maybe Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy could have made a difference. But Wills argues that in Nixon the country got exactly what it wanted, which was the opposite of what the “kids” wanted, i.e., a counter culture that rejected the technocracy. It’s interesting to me that resistance to the technocracy is a theme carried now not by the Left as then but by New Right figures like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari. The Democrats and the cultural left are dominated by meritocrats whose sole concern is not to challenge the toxicity of the technocracy itself, but to make it more hospitable to the marginalized. That the technocracy is dragging us off a cliff doesn’t seem to concern them. No wonder then why the electorate is so ambivalent.

6. It’s remarkable how influential utopian novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) were in the late 1800s. There was still hope before the World Wars.

7. Nicola Chiaromonte writes in 1968

…the young—those born after 1940—find themselves living in a society that neither commands nor deserves respect…. For has modern man in his collective existence, laid claim to any god or ideal but the god of possession and enjoyment and the limitless satisfaction of material needs? Has he put forward any reason for working but the reward of pleasure and prosperity? Has he, in fact, evolved anything but this “consumer society” that is so easily and falsely repudiated? 

It’s a society that celebrates Last Men. The best of the kids in the counter culture in the ‘60s aspired to something more.

8. As in Bill Buckley: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” But there is no stopping history; there is only directing it toward some desired outcomes. Buckley didn’t like the way history was going, but witty fellow that he was, he wasn’t very probing in his understanding about how history works. In the end his conservatism was just a nostalgia for a traditionalist world in which he grew up with enormous privileges that was being destroyed, ironically, by the laissez-faire capitalism he so enthusiastically embraced. Buckley was an entertaining polemicist, but hard to take seriously.

9. The Steve Balmer clip linked to in the previous pargraph is cringey because it is so performative and forced and then demands a forced performative response from the audience.