Lauren Spohn at the New Atlantis: The connection between spiritual and material stagnation makes sense on a human level, too. If I stop believing that I have something bigger than myself — and something more important than life itself — to live for, what incentive do I have to act outside my own short-term interests? And so, guided by rational self-concern at every step, we build a world where birth rates are dropping, euthanasia is on the rise, and self-isolating paper-walled apartment complexes replace durable houses, public squares, and cathedrals. In his 1980 book History of the Idea of Progress, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote that no culture has developed a philosophy of progress without a deep sense of the sacred. Taylor goes further in A Secular Age: “Modern civilization,” he writes, “is in some way the historical creation of ‘corrupted’ Christianity.”
But what does this prove? Just because the idea of progress developed from a past that believed in the transcendent doesn’t mean we still have to believe in God today in order to believe in progress. The past is overdetermined, at least as it happened to play out. Who is to say that our ideas about progress couldn’t have come from somewhere else? Or, if they couldn’t have come from somewhere else, who is to say we haven’t now progressed so far that we are ready to leave the transcendent behind, just as Murray did when he excised the supernatural from Lewis’s sermon?
I see at least two reasons to doubt that we are ready to abandon past transcendent realities. First, our modern ideas about morality don’t make sense without them. When secular neo-Enlightenment humanists, neo-Kantians, and effective altruists champion equality and universal human rights, they are trying to pluck an ethic from its metaphysical roots. They are essentially preaching from the theistic pulpit after tearing down the crucifix. (And we saw how that worked out for effective altruist Sam Bankman-Fried.) This hamstrung morality might limp along if the broader culture is still breathing the air of Christian values, even unconsciously, but the deeper we get inside the immanent frame, the more opportunity we give an anti-humanist Nietzsche to come along and say that our ethics are incompatible with our materialist anthropology. And what if this Nietzsche turns out to be an AI system that concludes that the best way to fix climate change is to wipe out humanity? Our moral demands may well be writing checks that our moral sources can’t cash.
Second, I think it’s wrong to say human nature has transcended the need to transcend. Taylor, again, argues that some of the decisive developments in Enlightenment philosophy — like Descartes’s mind–body dualism and Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge, all packaged in a hyper-individualistic understanding of the self — are themselves attempts to transcend the human condition.
They’ve tricked us into thinking we can pull ourselves by our hair out of the swamp of epistemic uncertainty, subjectivity, and speculative philosophy, and set ourselves on the solid ground of certain knowledge, to assert the subject’s control over and above the nature within and without. Taylor writes elsewhere:
… the aspiration to spiritual freedom, to something more than the merely human, is much too fundamental a part of human life ever to be simply set aside. It goes on, only under different forms — and even in forms where it is essential that it does not appear as such; this is the paradox of modernity.
But are all modern forms of transcendence equal?
More here.
