Some Books On My Mind, Part 1
How does culture shape our conception of the self?
Several books have been on my mind recently, particularly A Secular Age by Charles Taylor and The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. Both make fascinating claims about the effect religion has had on the trajectory of Western society, and I’ll do my best to summarize some of their arguments here. To be clear, neither of these writers are advocating for a particular faith; Taylor is a philosopher and Henrich is a psychologist, and their research offers useful observations for thinking about the function of cultural norms more broadly.
A Secular Age is often categorized as philosophy, but I think it’s also accurate to describe it as a work of social history. Taylor proposes a definition of secularism as not merely the absence of religious beliefs, but also the presence of specifically secular beliefs, such as religious pluralism and the separation of church from state. He argues that, with the spread of Protestant Christianity, a conception emerged that he calls the “buffered” self in contrast to the “porous” self that characterized the inhabitants of pre-Reformation Europe. The Reformation coincided with a qualitative shift in how people experienced reality, from one in which they were susceptible to supernatural forces to one in which they were sealed off from the world as individuals. This shift toward a belief in an external, impersonal order eventually paved the way for deism and ultimately secularism.
The ideas in Taylor’s book remind me of the psychologist Julian Jaynes’s bicameral mind hypothesis. By analyzing texts such as the Old Testament and the Iliad, he concluded that what we experience as introspection and volition were once perceived by ancient peoples as divine commands. This perception, which was a byproduct of how different regions of the brain processed experience, supposedly broke down during the Bronze Age Collapse, when mass migrations forced humans to become more cognitively flexible.
Taylor wrote two other books, The Sources of the Self and The Malaise of Modernity, and they provide a useful framework for thinking about anomie. Sociologically, anomie is defined as the inability to function due to the breakdown of social norms. The absence of a coherent value system creates a mismatch between a society’s culture and its structure that denies people legitimate paths for achieving their goals. Some people resolve this conflict by rejecting such goals and ultimately withdrawing from society, as illustrated by the hikikomori in Japan, young men who isolate themselves in response to extreme pressure to achieve professional success.[1]
A concept related to anomie is social capital, and the forces responsible for its erosion in modern America are detailed by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Dining establishments like pubs and cafes, places of worship like churches, and recreational spaces like bowling alleys constitute “third places” that are neither workplaces nor homes. Such venues promote informal social interactions among strangers and are important for fostering social cohesion among a community’s members. Especially popular in midcentury America were clubs and volunteer organizations, like bowling leagues. However, technological advancements like television and demographic changes like the decades-long migration of families to the suburbs isolated households and caused the membership of these organizations to decline.
While Putnam locates dysfunction in civic life, Taylor locates it in spiritual life. Taylor is a communitarian and believes that people’s sense of identity, purpose, and meaning derive from their relationship to a community. This contrasts with the classical liberal view, which holds that individuals precede society. However, the solution to normlessness for Taylor isn’t necessarily deference to a single tradition. In fact, he argues that a community’s failure to recognize or affirm a person’s identity inflicts harm by distorting the self. His idea is that, since the values that constitute a person’s identity don’t develop in a vacuum, people feel “lost” when they fail to integrate external sources of meaning into their personal standards. This poses what Taylor sees as the crisis of modernity.
Stay tuned for Part 2, which discusses Henrich’s book and others.
[1] Interestingly, Émile Durkheim held that Protestants experience anomie more than Catholics, as shown by their higher suicide rates.