Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

Some notes for a response to this book that I have agreed to write.

Taylor's key concepts:
Does not propose a 'subtractive' account of secularization but rather a transformative and additive one. Nor an intentional one: religious projects unexpectedly aid secularization (but not vice versa?). Three kinds of secularity:
1. the displacement of God from social life (i.e. the emergence of godless institutions and relations)
2. the loss of belief in God (partly as a result of scientific truth regimes)
3. an immanentizing of moral life (of belief, experience and search)(4) and here the recovery of 'benevolence' as a merely human capacity in the eighteenth century is key: the 'charter of modern unbelief' (257). Science and Reason don't dethrone God, humanism does.
He is most interested in the third.
In this regard he tells a not unfamiliar story.
In the pre-axial age, the world was enchanted because people were triply "embedded". They were totally embedded in social, cosmic and in the practices and terms of human flourishing (i.e. Aristotlian eudaimonia). Here no possibility for conversion, no alternatives and also no salvation.
Then the 'great disembedding' which is a slow process with certain key stages.
1. axial religions which create a distant transcendent order defined as the good and with a good will to the world
2. the Christian history in which the life of the saintly becomes massified through discipline
3. an overturning of the relation between the world and the transcendent in the process of this discipline (the cancellation of festival) as rationalization takes over and grace departs. Prime movers of this a mix of ne0-Stoicism (Lipsius) and Protestant Augustianianism. Now selves become "buffered": that is they can make autonomous decisions within an array of choices of faith, vocation, location etc, which implies a distantiation between self and society.

This against the classic enlightened account of secularization. That is: there is in fact no knowable transcendent order nor any God. Beliefs in God are false beliefs. This has been increasingly apparent and sayable, but for a long period many knew the truth but could not publicly articulate it, sometimes using beliefs in God to empower themselves (double think, esotericism). Leo Strauss. And those who now profess anti-secularism from the academy are in fact in bad faith: they tend to be secularist anti-secularists. Arguments such as secularism has been just as violent and murderous as religion are of this type since they are in effect utilitiarian.
And against the classic alternative (Edmund Law): modern truth regimes based on scepticism, rationality, empiricism and pragmatism, refine religion. They allow faith to strip off its secular baggage. There is not necessarily more religion in the world but secularization is actually an intensification and purification of faith. (E.g. Edmund Law, Pitcock on Duns Scotus)

Problems:
Leaving aside its Eurocentrism.
Leaving aside its lack of materialism: the absence of markets, classes etc as explanatory concepts.
There's a method problem: Taylor habitually classifies process and formations into discrete categories (usually in threes). These processes dont interact, don't join or mutually constitute themselves by contestation. Is reason really separable from humanism.
Also the question of omission: 'brute ease' (Wollstonecraft), distraction, fiction, culture....
The underplaying of anti-clericism, and the political and economic role of the church.
were non-axial societies in fact embedded in the way supposed: Polynesia for instance? different iwi, possibity of moving into other iwi through 'slavery'; ambiguities about magical powers of prophets;
Homer?
can one talk about a triple embeddment except nostalgically: these societies had no distinction between religion, the social, the ethical after all. (But that does not mean they were enchanted and embedded). The ultimate logic is that a wholly enchanted society is not enchanted at all at least for itself since no outside to transcendental participation. Does such a society exist? Does not this show all the signs of myth?
What is enchantment for Taylor? Not so much a matter of belief, but a particular 'cosmic imaginary': time and space and events are connected to the transcendent.
the process by which the mass sanctification/disciplining of the social order loses touch with grace and becomes immanent is actually contestatory
the importance of anti-clericism to Enlightenment.
It is also dotted with accommodation and double think. E.g. Mary Wollstonecraft's use of the concept of the divine in The Rights of Women. It is because God and virtue is universal than women have as much right to pursue virtue as men for God and immortality. But does she mean God and salvation, or immortality in the sense of contributing to a progressivist perfectioning of human history. Double talk here. This not at all embarrassing to Taylor: it describes the mechanism through which the process works.

at a level of general theory:
There never was enchantment (and if there was neither the sacred nor the secular existed for it). What is there is more secularity and more refined religion. It is addititve all the way: there are various distances between them (the myth of disenchantment marks out a large distance) but also various intimate exchanges.
secularization as a process names itself and something larger than itself, because the forces that oppose it belong to it. This is basic dialectic theory. But these forces do not disappear and are not subsumed: they may continue and become refined. Religion is itself a secularized concept as is enchantment: religion itself helped by secularization, depends on it, but there is no terminus to this process and impossible to predict winners and losers.
Religion will give up on salvation, give up 'flourishing', become a kind of worship of the mystery, with no utility, no rational legitimation, no representational or narrative content.
Particularly important:
mysticism, death, charity/sensibility/scarcity, aesthetics/secular magic/popular culture in the contemporary sense.

There never was an enchanted world or, if there was, the modern secularised world is just as enchanted if differently. What we lose in a diminishing of interactivity supernature/nature, we regain in complexity and engagement in second nature. Among the richness of contemporary second nature are (false) memories of enchantment: the bequeathing of rich experiences by the desert fathers (Helen Waddell).
The real social problems that face us are not existential but political and biopolitical: the failure of endgame capitalism to provide for hope.
Transcendental appeals did not provide "meaning" outside particular forms of social power which after about 1500 rapidly came to seem restrictive.

Some drivers of secularization he does not attend to:
the aristocratic-military distance from the church: this lies behind libertinism, which is important to secularization.

I delight in my status of cosmic and social disembededness. It offers me a lightness of being, a freedom and makes experiences, thoughts, powers and pleasures available to me that no cosmic embededness could match. For all that my disembeddness is not chosen by me: it is enjoined upon me by truth. For it is true that no knowable God exists, that supernatural agencies are not at work in the world. This is not, in any important way, a matter of belief, it is a matter of evidence (and rational thought).