Charles Taylor and Liberalism

(From Tarik Jan for Zubair bin Umer Siddiqui) 

Here are some eminent contemporaries writing about secularism.

“(Secularisation is) the deliverance of man, first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language. It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents the “defatalisation of history,” the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or furies for what he does with it. Secularization occurs when man turns his attention away from worlds beyond and towards this time.”

Summarizing it Cox says: “Secularization implies a historical process, almost certainly irreversible, in which society and culture are delivered from tutelage to religious control and closed metaphysical world views.”

What kind of man secularilization produces?  Cox says: “Secular man does not occupy himself much with mysteries…. Pro-fane means literally ‘outside the temple’… By calling him ‘profane’, we do not suggest that secular man is sacrilegious, but that he is un religious.”   

I feel constrained to quote from my own book Engaging Secualrism: Limits of a Promise:

"Charles Taylor’s award-winning book A Secular Age ( 2007) says that the secularists always wanted religion not to tangle with secularism. Better still if it goes willingly in sync with secularism so that humanity could climb up the trajectory of progress driven by the engine of reason. To him, the Nietzsche adage of God being dead means that religion has lost its pull on people - it is nothing more than a fatigued voice from a distant past.

"The secular age, which Taylor equates with modernity, is a scientific mode of thinking and has its constituents in pragmatism, negative freedom, individualism, and instrumental reason. In the secular thinking if humans deliver themselves from false religious superstitions and meaningless metaphysical notions, then eventually they will embrace secular modernity for this is what their nature want.  Viewed as such, individualism is a consequence of respecting the human self, which is the sole arbiter of human affairs. There are no delusional claims made about God now nor does society have a self-styled sacred system propped upon such pretensions. Structured as they were around human naivety, the past ages, he says, have now been reposed forever in antiquity."

Chales Taylor is alive. He is not 200 years old.