- Good afternoon, everybody.
And welcome to the first
in a discussion series
on Global Religious and Secular Dynamics.
My name is Jose Casanova
and I'm a sociologist,
Professor of Sociology
and Professor of Theology
and Religious Studies
at Georgetown University
as well as a Senior Fellow
at the Berkeley Center
for Religion, Peace and World Affairs,
which sponsors these series.
Good afternoon here in
the East Coast where both
Charles Taylor and I am
but I know some of you
is good morning in the West Coast,
for others is good evening
in Europe in the Middle East
goodnight in Asia and even
past midnight in Australia.
Welcome all.
We are fortunate to have
as the first speaker
in our series, in our conversations,
the great living philosopher,
Canadian, Quebecker Charles Taylor.
Charles, welcome to our conversation.
We are going to have a
conversation between both of us,
we are going to cover four topics,
The Secular Age, The Crisis of Democracy,
Linguistic Anthropology
or Global Human Condition
in a Catholic Modernity.
It will be first conversation
perhaps a bit superficial,
but I think that it blends well
key aspects of Charles Taylor's life work.
After our conversation,
we'll have a 20 minute
period for question and answer.
And so please, you have there a chat.
And you can write your
questions and answers.
And we'll try to give
you the opportunity to
for Charles Taylor to respond.
Without further ado,
Charles, good afternoon.
Again, it's a great pleasure
to have you with us,
it will be much better if we
could be physically together.
But this is a still a
substitute is important
that we keep socially connected
an intellectual conversation under those
conditions of physical distance.
So again, let's begin
with "A Secular Age."
This is a book that obviously made you
famous beyond philosophy.
It became almost you could say
an intellectual best seller.
Did you expect such a response
to the book "A Secular
Age" when you were writing?
- No, I didn't, I thought it would be
largely ignored by most people
but just specialists in the field
might find some interesting ideas.
You remember, when we
worked it out together,
I finished the draft
in discussions with you
and Hans Joas very intensely in Berlin.
And I thought then it's
a continuation of that
kind of discussion among
sociologists and philosophers.
And suddenly, to my surprise it--
- Well, it certainly went
beyond anybody's expectation
and I'm so pleased that it happened.
So now one of the concepts
you develop in the book
you had already begun developing,
is this of the imminent frame.
Explain what we what we
mean by the imminent frame.
And how is it connected
with our secularize.
- Yes, well, I'm trying to get out there
they what we all understand
that we all understand.
People's understanding of what they share
in their understanding of their situation.
Now if you go back to the Middle Ages,
Early Modern Period in Europe,
there was a biblical story
that everyone accepted
there was a fight between
different versions
of Christianity, there was a sense
that we also lived in a
Cosmos with moral orders
that the various kingdoms and so on were
based on these cosmic realities et cetera.
And today, it's really
very, very different.
What we all understand,
that we all understand
across all civilizations,
is roughly speaking
the natural science view
of the natural world,
the sense that our different societies
have all been created by
human beings at a certain time
revolutions and so on.
The sense that we live
in in man's timeframe,
stretching back unimaginably
millions of years
and in the evolution of the universe
then we have different positions
within that we some of us
are into certain faiths.
Others are against faith and so on.
But everybody understands that
that's what everybody
understands starting point.
And that's what I call
the, if you like the frame
and I call an imminent frame
because it's elements are totally
imminent and they transcend.
- So okay, so this the imminent frame
meaning is based on
horizontal institutions,
without any reference to transcendence?
They all operate as if God
would not exist, right?
But as if there was none directly.
And obviously, in Europe,
the emergence of this imminent frame,
perhaps because it was there
that you could be develop
had very negative consequences for the
survival of traditional
forms of Christianity.
The spectation was that
is the imminent frame
becomes globalized to other civilizations,
the same will happen, the same process
of decline of religion, and basically,
rather, purely secular is the only option
of normal life could also happen.
But this has not been the case.
So how can we explain that
within such an imminent frame,
such a diversity of
possibilities of global religious
and secular dynamics are possible?
- Yeah, well, I think
he was to turn it around
why should that change people's mind?
It means, of course, that
one's religious faith
is in a quite different context.
I mean, think of religious
faith 16th century
world of magic, of magic forces,
God is a being that could
defend us against that.
But it's perfectly
possible to turn it around
and say within this imminent frame,
people are searching for meaning,
they're searching for a sense of
what human beings can become,
how they can grow and so on.
And some people are gonna see that growth,
that development, that journey
towards something greater
in terms of religious faiths,
and indeed, what we find
in the imminent frame now
is a tremendous growth and diversification
of different ideas of what
the spiritual development is.
So it's in a sense,
it's a different context
it inflects all faith
positions differently
but it doesn't rule out
the possibility of faith
quite the contrary.
- Right.
And yet you in your lifetime
you've experienced personally
the rate transformation
of Quebecker Society
from being a uniformly Catholic,
and then suddenly almost a
homogeneous radically secular.
So it seems that Quebec
is almost a confirmation
of the European notion
of a self fulfilling
prophecy of secular modernity.
And yet, we see the parallel
to that in Latin America,
you see, the transformation
of the societies,
their own silent revolutions,
leading into all kinds
of religious pluralism.
So how do we explain under
which conditions then
one seems to, this
imminent frame it seems to
lead to homogeneous secularity.
And when does it open up the possibility
for precisely all forms of pluralism?
- Yeah.
Well you see if the previous period
in which there was this
sole unanimous belief
in this case, the
Catholic Church in Quebec,
if it was a period in which
people really suffered
is certain kinds of
restriction, oppression
being forced to do things
they didn't want to do
and so on, then, the change
in the global understanding
of where we are at, is
seen as a possibility,
where we can get rid of all this,
we can throw it all away.
And that's what of course,
was lived in my society in Quebec.
But if you take a society
on the other end of the
spectrum, like the United States,
which in a sense became plural,
roughly around the time
of the Great Awakening
or the Great Awakenings,
maybe the second one
in the early 19th century
then it's a quite different situation.
And so you see these
very, very different ways
of responding and again, and
in the Latin American case
in Brazil and so on it's
something different again
what's clear in all these cases
is you get plural pluralism,
glorification, growth of
different possibilities.
And that exists here too,
because in the generation after the one
that threw the church out
there are young people that are saying,
"well, what are we gonna
do with our lives?"
Well, I mean, we're searching
for some kind of meaning
for some kind of, in some
cases, spiritual growth
and that's happening in all sorts of ways.
So it depends if the
experience prior to pluralism
was very negative, then
it's reached to this
rejection of religion.
- Right.
So it seems that it's
also, as you point out
a radical transformation.
Pluralism was viewed as a negative fact
these what explains the Wars of Religion.
Nobody could imagine the possibility of
different religious beliefs
in the same society.
There had to be homogeneity,
thus the Westphalian model.
While we've moved from this model,
it was for plurality of beliefs,
which are heresies, or false doctrines
to a positive recognition of plurality
is a positive development into pluralism
to which extent this is one of the factors
of our global condition recognition
of a kind of hereditament plurality,
especially in the field of
the world system of religions.
- Yes, well, I think that this has
causes its reactions and we
have various parts of the world
in which is still thought to be a disaster
so now it's thought as
something that has to be
stamped out and really, you know,
very, very tight discipline.
If you look at the evolution
of a society like Pakistan,
It's really very, very worrying.
But it's very much a lesson of that,
Pakistan was started with the idea of
an Islamic state that was
Islamic State culturally
that was connected to the
culture of the moguls and so on.
And it's slowly evolved towards a state
that is permitting people,
Islamic in the narrowest
possible sense of Wahhabi time
discipline around, they're
a very narrow notion
of the Sharia.
So you get people who are on death row,
now for being accused
of blasphemy and so on.
So there are reactions
to this kind of pluralism
in various parts of the world.
And they become in a certain sense,
even more viciously narrow (laughs)
than the original, raw, the
conformist societies that--
- But of course, paradox here
is that we know the Jinnah
the founder of the idea of Pakistan
himself was really an atheist.
He didn't take Islamic religion seriously.
Muslim identity yes but
not Islamic beliefs.
- Even worse than that,
he was a member of a sect
that would be probably
victims of drive by killings
of Ultra Shia sect, and
yet he's still revered.
There's a kind of tremendous
cognitive distance in Pakistan
so he was both not really a believer
but he was connected to a sect
which is considered not
really Islamic anymore,
by most, anyway, lots of Pakistanis.
- These resets to the next
topic of The Crush of Democracy
and to a large extent it has also
to do with attempts to impose
the kind of religious or
ethno-religious homogeneity,
that of course, was also
the mother of Westphalia
this is what happened in Europe
and to to a large extent, there has been
a tragic repetition of this model
of ethno-religious uniformity for the sake
of the nation or state and
of religious nationalism,
this is one of the crisis of democracy.
But there are many others
which have to do with
even populist rejections
of liberal democracy
in the West, you've been working
with your friends with Craig
with Philip on a new book,
precisely analyzing
this crisis of democracy
and how we can somehow respond to it.
You've been involved in democracy
both as a political thinker
but also as an activist,
you're one of the founding members
of the New Democratic Party of Canada,
you have been a social
democrat before Bernie Sanders
was a social democrat.
(laughs)
And to a certain extent,
you've been always
very much involved both intellectually
but also politically
involved in democracy.
So how do you see our contemporary moment
and what is the fundamental for you
the most fundamental
crisis of democracy today?
- Well, I think the faith
of Western democracy
the crisis is the rise of what we call
not really very apathetic populism,
And that is, there is a sense among
the idea that one has
to mobilize the people
defined as ordinary people
who are not part of the elites
but the mobilization is around extremely
as you say, extremely narrow,
and notions of identity
and that exclude others
that exclude people with
varieties of ways of approaching.
And I think that this
has different sources.
One of the sources in
our Western societies
has been that a lot of ordinary people
were neglected in the era you might see
a new liberalism where there
was globalization carried
through without a concern for whether
they were victims losers as
well as gainers from this
without any attempt to inflect
the gains so that makes sure
that everybody was on board
and I think the United
States is a key example
of that kind of cause
where the society moved
more and more towards galloping inequality
and tremendous deprivation
and that's one of the things
that could easily turn into populism.
Then if you go to the other
end of the Western world
and you look at a country like Poland,
it's somewhat different,
is that they have this experience
of their nationalism,
which is very much linked
with the Catholic church or older now,
ideally the Catholic Church,
suppressed for years for
decades under communist regime.
And so when the liberation comes back,
it's easier to argue by people
who have this kind of view that
that's really what Poland is all about
and that it's not about being open,
liberal, plural and so on.
So there are different kinds
of origin of this thing
but it happens that we are in a,
I don't know why, in a
constellation in the world
in which these bad movements are winning
and even India is not connected
to the Western world at all.
Indian democracy is moving
in a very worrying direction
with Modi with a kind
of very narrow notion
of Hindu persecuting the largest minority,
the second largest Muslim
society in the world
in terms of population has just
had a law passed where doesn't recognize
Muslims as Indian citizens.
So, we have this--
- You mentioned Poland,
what is to me evident
in these contemporary regime in Poland
is a very clear critique of rule of law,
of justice former justice by experts
but also of liberalism, for in the name
of majoritarian democracy.
So you get a affirmation
of the rule of the majority
but without concern for minority rights
and without concern really for
a fundamental constitutional order
that protects everybody.
To me, it's a dissociation of
three elements of democracy
that were also separate
in the 19th century.
Liberals used to be anti-democrats,
democrats used to be anti-liberals.
And you will have a rule of law in Prussia
that was neither liberal nor democrat.
So part of the problem
and we see it in Trump
is very majoritarian rule without
any also concern for institutions,
legal institutions rule of law,
and also a certain totally dis-concern
for the rights of minorities.
So to which extent is a
fundamental problem today
how to bring together
because one understands
a critique of liberal elites,
but in the critiques of
basically pure expertise,
legal formalist but when
it goes to undermining
the fundamental legal
constitutional structures
and minorities, professional
minorities rights
then there is a fundamental problem.
So to which extent this is
a fundamental issue today?
- I think it's absolutely fundamental
but how to defeat it is the big question.
What powers it, is a sense
of the national identity,
which is very much this in a narrow sense
it anchored in mostly in the past,
and a tremendous fear.
So the fear around losing that
is what makes all these illiberal regimes
try to make their power irreversible.
So what you see in all of them in Hungary,
they succeeded in doing that.
In Poland, the fight now is that they,
you know, the reigning party is trying to
change the judicial system,
fire judges and so on.
The idea is to make it irreversible
what you see in the Trump regime
with the Republicans in the United States
Well, Republicans in
general have been trying
to have this kind of irreversibility
by both suppressing and so on.
And in the case of Trump
who go to any length
to make sure that he
doesn't get turned out,
there's completely abandon the idea
of as a democratic society, which well,
we rule for a while,
and then you take over
and you rule for a while but you open
the possibility of it continuing.
So how you undermine that immense fear
around a certain identity which makes it
just inconceivable or horrible to think
that one could ever change.
That is the big challenge today.
- And of course, too, as you point out
the growing, global problem
of growing economic inequality
and social inequality to these
we are the global pandemic and it is also
precisely made clear manifest
the consequence of these inequalities
but then in has produce a retrenching
towards presenting national autarkic
you know almost Americantlism
right even the European Union,
closing its inner borders once again
abandoning the Schengen
model and retracting
to a purely national a unit
Black Lives Matter protest
that under those conditions
despite the fear of well contagion,
you have people risking their health
for the sake of an idea, is
not any more simply Blacks,
African Americans, but now
you see a very wide spread
other populations supporting
the both participating
but also majority of
the American population
supporting the demonstration.
So do you see here a point of influx
or revitalization of democracy?
- Yes, I think I do.
And, you know, there was one good thing
that came from the COVID crisis,
one good thing, which was
in many, many societies
an immense wave of solidarity
which precisely bridged the divisions
in many cases that existed before.
And I think that that sense of solidarity
greater solidarity you know,
we're faced with the same crisis,
with the same danger, with
the same enemy, as it were.
People said, the beginning
is like a wartime
and I think that's very true.
It's like the, you know,
declaration of wartime,
which I was old enough to
remember in the Second World War,
when a lot of lines of
division were closed
because people thought
we have a common enemy
and we have to get
together and fight them.
And I think that that
stronger sense of solidarity
is partly explaining
the wonderful reaction
to the killing of George Floyd I mean,
it's partly the horrible
scene in which he was killed.
But I think it's also
because there's a sense
that we have to hang together now
we have to create a kind of unity
and that's why, not just
in the United States
but worldwide in Canada and elsewhere
there is this very strong feeling,
no we can't carry on like this
with these kinds of hierarchical views
of who really matters.
And we have to do something about it.
I think that comes from the very context
of the COVID crisis in which it arose.
- Right, especially the realization
to the extent to which
discriminated racial minorities
have been disproportionately impacted
by this inequality, by the
crisis when this is big.
This is a very positive aspect.
For me the fundamental
question remains however,
that the answers have been
purely national so far
and we know that these crises
are global crises that required also
transnational solidarity,
also in their response.
And so part of the problem
I see today is that
we can innovate transnational
international structure
partly because of the United States
that was the leader
abandoned it, and partly
because of the growth of
authoritarian regimes in China,
in Russia, in India, et cetera
that are not interested in creating
these transnational structures.
So the point is, to which extent
we need to go beyond
internal democracy precisely
towards developing a structures
of transnational solidarity
because it's not only the global pandemic,
it's of course, the
global ecological crisis,
is a crisis of global refugees,
is the crisis of base,
equally global inequality.
None of these problems can be
solved in one single country.
If you associate democracy in one country
is not possible today,
for economic reasons
for many reasons.
So how can we go both
reinforce national democracies
to make them lively and
that responsive to people,
but at the same time be
able to transcend them?
So how can we do that?
- Well, I think we have some
of the basis for doing that
in the way we've responded to
the the Coronavirus crisis,
because the idea is we want,
first of all the solidarity
within the society.
But secondly, the idea
that here's something
really overriding our normal concerns for
my own prosperity or my own job and so on.
It's something that goes beyond that.
And that can only be fought
on an international level.
So you could imagine we
could emerge from this
with a sense that yeah,
we have to pull together
not only within societies,
but between societies.
And we could start a new kind of movement,
which would mean that we
would have a more effective
fight against global
climate change as well.
Then what tells against that
is that we've spent a
tremendous amount of money,
rightly keeping people afloat,
who've lost their jobs or businesses
that couldn't function and so on.
And I know there'll be
people who will be saying
at the end of all this, if ever
there is an end to all this
"look, we're so much in debt,
"we can't possibly afford a program
"of really fighting for global,
"against global climate
change, and so on."
And I think Left and
Right are gonna line up
as we leave this crisis around that issue.
Does this I mean, one thing is to say
what it showed us that we
were terribly unprepared
to face this kind of
thing 'cause we ran down
our health systems or old
folks homes and so on,
let's never do that again.
And the other response would be well,
Oh be spend so much money,
we're so much in debt.
We can't afford it.
So let's run the beam further down
in order to get back to
our level of production
before the crisis.
And I think we, you know,
I don't know exactly
who is gonna win this battle. (laughs)
I know it's not long but
we have a real chance
we have a real chance because
of what's the mindset created
in the crisis of doing the
right thing or once. (laughs)
- But there was a time, obviously,
where you talk over
international social democracy
in Europe, it gave a new
light to European Union
beyond what had originally been at least
a democratic project.
But now really, really social
democracy transnational
is in serious crisis
throughout Europe we see it.
And so, how can we somehow
recover this tradition
and how can we revitalize it for our
contemporary global condition?
I'm not sure but obviously,
you've been at this fight for a long time.
So do we have any idea of how--
- We need new kinds of alliances in a way.
there were moments in our history,
like the New Deal, the first
New Deal of the United States
was a recreation of a new kind of alliance
to fight a crisis that
hadn't existed before.
And people are talking
now in the United States
about our Green New Deal (laughs)
that's the same idea.
But in countries of Europe, we
have to have a new alignment.
I mean, for instance, in Germany,
it has to be an alignment of various
Left parties and the Greens.
You know, the Greens are a very
important possible vehicle.
This when you think of the election
of Bavaria last year
that a lot of the votes
lost by the Right wing went to the Greens.
So it won't be simply a social
democratic or in France,
a Socialist Party has
virtually disappeared.
But it could be a realignment
which produces a new situation,
a new political course
and I think the possibility is there
the were a lot of young people are at
in all our societies at this point,
politically is they're ready
to move in that direction
but we have to be
creative in bringing about
the new kinds of alignments.
- And if we can move now to
your life work, you've basically been
a consistent critique
of what could be called
any form of naturalism.
Naturalism, your first
critique in your book,
"The Explanation of Behavior" in 1963, 64,
against precisely the model
of the natural sciences
to understand human societies
from the social science, human sciences.
You develop a critique of communitarian
critique of liberalism,
which has also some of these elements
a critique of purely
formalist epistemologies
and now in your new book,
"The Language Animal,"
a book which I do
recommend everybody to read
this the book that at the
base of which you receive
one of the last big prizes, right?
You got the Templeton
Prize and the Kyoto Prize,
the Kluge Prize together
with Jürgen Habermas
from the Library of Congress
and then the Berggruen Prize
Now this is a book in which you tried to
it's called "The Language Animal"
very clearly we are could be
called "The Language Mammal"
we are an animal species,
and the attempt to
any type of epistemology any type of
understanding of reason,
which is disembodied
and dis-embedded from social
context will not work.
The subtitle is the "Full Shape of
the Human Linguistic Capacity"
and you develop as a critique of
you put two different types
of linguistic anthropology
one right HLC, Hobbes Locke Condillac
and then the three aids
of German romanticism,
Harmond Humbolt Hargen.
What do you mean by this
critique of a purely,
designative theory of language
that only is an utensil is again, useful,
but really is not considerative
of fascist humans.
Can you explain?
- You see the Hobbes, Locke, Condillac
all those three thinkers,
what they were interested in language for
was language enables us
to formulate information,
you know, record it and
communicate it to others.
They were thinking always
of how does it help us
build a science of the world right,
and their followers in the
modern analytic philosophy,
theories of language with a certain number
of very important changes
really introduced by Fregean
are really focusing on the same thing.
But if you look at human
beings in language,
just obvious that it's
doing other things for us.
It's I mean, if you look at art,
if you look at literature,
if you look at the role of metaphor,
incidentally, metaphor
is the enemy for Hobbes
and Locke and Condillac their customs say,
you know, this is their confusing science
if you use this word for that.
See, but metaphor, we live by metaphors
but also what language does,
is it relates us to each other.
So we thinking of
linguistic anthropologists
like Michael Silverstein in Chicago
who really shown that language creates
a communication between
people and therefore
sets up all kinds of relations of people
including hierarchical
relations between people
and so you know, a when
I was a kid in Quebec
everybody, we used to speak to our parents
with the familiar with French tu.
And they would speak to us with vous.
And between classes, it
was also like that, right?
And we've had a revolution
in the modern world
in which people have
struggled against that.
And in places like Sweden,
I understand everyone
calls her What else tu or do now, right?
So what is language doing here?
Language is framing how
people relate to each other.
And it does all sorts
of things of this kind
all sorts of functions in human life
other than simply collecting information,
building sciences, which is not to say
that that's not important
is tremendously important.
But you have to see this capacity,
scientific capacity as
it were placed within
a much broader range.
That's why I use that, you know, subtitle
"The Full Range of the
Human Linguistic Capacity."
I wanted to bury that kind
of theory once and for all.
- So let's talk about the global pandemic
and how these reinforces these issues
on the one hand, our
embeddedness in the live world
of nature and the violence
we are part of the live
world and so on, right?
Then the other the lack of communication
or the physical separation but then
the connectivity through
media but one of the strengths
of the new media is of course,
the focus on artificial
intelligence and big data
the kind of thing that
precisely reinforces
the other notion of reduced
linguistic capability.
So, to which extent what we are doing now,
despite doing it through media,
it still is able to reinforce this notion
of a linguistic capacity
goes beyond precisely
gathering information, big Data,
are purely a kind of mechanistic
artificial intelligence
that machines are more
rational than we are
and therefore they are better than we are.
So what are the lessons of
the pandemic in this respects?
- Well, I think that, you know,
they, there's a perpetual temptation
it's a great technological temptation
to be able to reduce everything
to machine intelligence
and so on.
And I think we're gonna
find with the pandemic,
it's gonna work in both directions
for exactly the usual reasons
that there's a certain kind of mindset,
which is gonna say, "well, let's you know,
"let's have a systems of control
"working out what people
should be allowed to do
"or not do, by machine intelligence."
And then they're going to be
other people who are saying,
"well, these are never going to work
"because human beings have to be
"brought to motivated towards have to
"in virtue of the certain notions of
"what they owe to other
people in their society,"
like the sense of solidarity we have today
that's an important part of it.
And you can't talk about
a machine intelligence
which is feels Solidarity.
I mean, you can't talk about
a machine that feels anything
(laughs)
that's why there's a perpetual fall back
falling short of these
claims that are made
for artificial intelligence.
Now, there are certain needs
that it really can very
well do it can, you know,
like, can calculate, calculate
in a much more quickly
than ordinary human beings.
But there are certain functions
that it just can't take over.
So what we get is, in my long life,
I've seen there are booms and busts.
There was a theory of psychology
which was a behaviorist when I was younger
and I wrote a book saying it was no good.
And it collapsed.
And I thought for a moment I
did it, but I didn't do it.
It collapse of its own weight.
But then people who have
a mechanistic mindset
needed something so
they found the computer.
Oh, the computer that's it, nothing,
simply looking at behavior
but looking at the computers
and there's a whole wave of that
and then that collapsed.
And then you see there is this motivation
always to find a certain mindset.
It's the kind of Cartesian
being masters and possessors
of nature mindset that pushes people
and we're going to have this
series of booms and busts,
booms and busts, booms and busts.
But there's always going to be a version
(laughs)
of the mechanistic outlook,
which is riding high.
- Let's move then onto the
question of different narratives.
Precisely, it's not only that
we need feelings and machines,
but also narratives are parts of what is
constitute of ourselves
in group identities,
and as you point out in
your big, big narrative
of a secular aids, the question is not
to get rid of narratives, but simply
you have to come up with
better, more compelling
more basically hermeneutically
full narratives.
One of them is you develop a text
is not well known "A Catholic Modernity."
What did you mean with this
narrative of a Catholic modernity.
What were you after?
- I was after trying to find ways
of being Catholic that made sense
in the world we're now in, right?
And I felt that the ways of being Catholic
that we were offered by
the established churches
remember that I was brought up in Quebec
before the revolution before
this make up. (laughs)
We're just designed to repel people
particularly young people
and send them out elsewhere.
So I was trying to struggle through
to the idea of modes of being Catholic
that would make sense today and of course,
that led me to the surrounding idea
that what it means to be a
Catholic has been very different
in different ages it's evolved
and has changed and so on.
And in that I was partly inspired
by the theology that underlay Vatican Two
the theology of people like
Judy Burke and Econ Gollins.
Their idea was let's go back
to the Fathers of the Church
and see what was going on then.
And then we'll have a point of view
outside our present situation in which to
ask if our ways of operating now
and as against the anti-modernism,
which was really itself very recent.
It was based on the Tridentine mindset.
They had a way of understanding that
we were gonna have different
ways of being Catholic,
but let's find the one
that makes sense for us.
That's really what got me going
and eventually led to
my making this lecture
and then from there (laughs)
the discussion --
- If we can continue in this vein
obviously you've always insisted that
Medieval Catholicism was
much more openly pluralist
than even later Catholicism right?
Although we see there's the
Golden Age of Catholicism
it was much more precisely pluralist
that the one that comes
out of the Tridentine
and then of course of Vatican One.
You refer to Vatican Two, for me always,
what is obvious from reading Vatican Two
is the associated fathers who
are from all over the world,
suddenly, are aware of
these global condition,
the sign of the times that globalization
they don't use the name yet
but whether it is Nostra Aetate
whether it is Dignitatis Humanae
whether it is Gagument Space.
This idea of the science of the times
of a new global age is
very, very powerful.
Now in these lecture,
you refer to Matteo Ricci
as a possibility of an
alternative form of Catholicism.
Indeed, for me, as you know,
I've been working on
Jesuit and globalization
looking for an alternative
form of competing models
of Catholic organization that of
inspired by the Catholic Kings, right,
the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French,
or by Rome that will come
with propaganda fitted.
Here you have this model of
based on open communication, accommodation
to other cultures partly the same way
that is, you say the
Daniel Lou and Congarme
have gone to the patristic.
They went to San Paul and the Gentiles.
And they realize that
if early Christianity
could be Latin and Greek
to radically different
forms of Christianity,
it could also be Chinese, it
could also be Indian Hindu,
and therefore the idea is
that of multiple Catholicisms.
So, the Christian story
itself is universal
but it is embedded in
very particular cultures
and understandings and contexts.
And so Christian
universalism cannot be the
globalization of Roman centralism.
But it will have to be some form of
understanding of the
multiplicities of Catholicism
through history and
today now in the globe.
So, we know that part of the
project of this Pope Francis,
precisely the acceptance of
these multiple local churches.
How do you think that this is something
which still can be brought back
by the very stronger systems
of Catholic uniformity?
- Well, I think it's what's
gonna make it irreversible
is the fact that the majority of Catholics
are rapidly if they
aren't already the case
outside of Europe, outside
of Europe and North America
outside of the Old West.
And what we're also
looking at is the effect
of the decline of the Imperial West.
Right?
When, you know, the history,
modern history of the West is more complex
than people think.
In the 18th century and the 17th century,
there wasn't necessarily this certainty
that Europe is absolutely
the be all and end all right?
There was a, on the contrary,
you get the end of the 18th century,
people like Burke who are horrified at
the way the British
Imperialist are creating
the Indian Empire and so on
because they're destroying
another culture.
You go through the 19th century
and you get this total belief that Europe
has the answers to everything.
Right and Left Marks and John Stuart Mill
both agreed that is a good thing that
the Indians are under British rule
because they'll get shaped up properly
so that they can be modern men.
And I think the disappearance of that
and it's reflected in the Catholic Church
by the fact that the majority of,
close to the majority
of Catholics are outside
this original imperial core means that
the idea of imposing the European model,
I think he's utterly,
there's no chance at all
it's it can't possibly succeed.
I know, I know that there are
holdouts in the Vatican still
and there are holdouts in certain parts
of the European and North
American Catholicism,
but the movement of history
is just not gonna make this possible.
- Okay you know, I'm
sure that the audience
has been very much quiet listening to us.
I think it's time to end our conversation
between both of us our dialog
and to open up to some of the panelists.
I already see some questions coming from
some close friends, common friends.
Let's see, I see a
question from Paolo Costa,
who is the translator of "A
Secular Age" into Italian.
And he has the question, has
the experience of the COVID-19
pandemic and of how the various religions
handle the health emergency
affected in some ways
your understanding of secularization?
- Well, no, I don't think it has really
I think that what I found
interesting and encouraging
in the COVID crisis, as I said earlier,
is a creation of a new kind
of solidarity in societies,
but I don't think that
it's had any effect at all
on the really big evolution
that I was talking about,
which is the evolution
towards the world of
and which is an immense
number of spiritual people
on the spiritual search
on a spiritual journey.
The number of these people are growing,
but the number of possible
journeys is also growing.
And I think that the whole COVID crisis
could only accentuate this further, right?
People are very often in the face of all
this people are turning to issues
of what was my life really mean?
What is my life based on?
What is my whole moral view based on?
And I think that that will just accentuate
the spread of this kind
of this kind of searching.
- Okay, there is another question
from Bill Barbieri again a common friend
who recently brought
you and Michael Walzer
together to American Catholic University
to discuss the "Crisis of Democracy."
And Bill asked Charles, I'd be interested
in any thoughts you
might have in this moment
about race and racism, and
how they are implicated
in first, the dynamics
of secular modernity
second, our pressing democratic crisis
and third, our linguistic anthropology
and how deep racial categories
help restructure modern thought.
- I think it's very, very interesting,
but very, very hidden.
I think what you have in a great number
of Western countries, including ours,
is a kind of unspoken,
unstressed sense of hierarchy.
Who comes first, who comes second, right?
There is not the old racism of you know,
we don't want these people all around us.
But the new kind of racism that, well,
this kind of person counts,
people who came first count
more than people who came later
or the people of this race count
more than the people race, you know,
and we have certain
amount of racism in Canada
but we also have this in relation
to Aboriginals in Canada,
a lot of mainstream Canadians
coming from elsewhere, originally
had that have that sense.
And it doesn't emerge until the people
who are thus disadvantaged protest,
and then you get a lot
of very harsh reactions,
but not an awful lot of theorization
because you can't say these things.
I mean, there are white
supremacists who do say things
but there are a small
minority of those who
share these responses.
So the big question,
the big challenge for us
is how to overcome these
largely unspoken attitudes,
which even the people who have them
don't quite recognize that they have them.
They don't quite recognize
they're being racist.
They just think it's kind of normal.
So when you know Black
Lives Matter movement start
a lot of people, a lot of
whites are tremendously
indignant of this so they've
rationalized that you know,
like Trump or against disorder
or against looting and so on.
But actually what it comes from
is a sense that why are
these people objecting?
They're in their proper place
of getting their due desserts.
And that I think, is that the insidious
kind of racism is something
we have to defeat.
Now there's this whole other
things we can do about that.
But I think that's the that's a fact
we have to see in our societies.
- Okay, there is a question
from Aristotle Papa Nicolau,
from the Public Orthodoxy
Center at Fordham University,
and they are related to again Orthodoxy
but the most broader question
of "The Secular Race"
how do you respond to the critique
that culture of secular is Western,
in the sense constructed in
use for colonial interests?
And then how can you speak
to how secularization
is taking shape in pos-communist countries
and in particular, Orthodox countries?
- Yes.
Well, I think that's something that
I didn't tackle in the book.
And I deliberately didn't tackle it
because I think that
processes that we can call
secularization are very different,
in very different parts of the world.
And it's even not the same thing in,
for instance, Latin America, as it is,
so I was claiming, they were talking about
the civilization that emerges
from Latin Christendom,
and even a big part of
that in Latin America
I couldn't really touch on.
And 'cause I realized,
I think I could explain
I could justify myself by saying that I
for a long time in political
science department,
people talked about secularization
as a world movement,
which happens in certain countries
like our countries first and
other countries afterwards.
And it's always seemed to me
to be absurdly Western-centric,
that this whole situation in China
the whole situation in the Muslim world
is something very, very different.
And there are analogs,
but we have to understand
them in their own terms.
So now that includes I
didn't really talk about it
the Eastern Orthodox Christian world.
And in a certain sense,
I've lacked more sense
because I've had the kind of conversations
that I hope the book as it would spark,
where an Indian friend of mine said
"it's very interesting
book you wrote on Europe.
"But that didn't happen here."
And I said, "good lets have a talk
"and discuss what did happen there."
And I think that that's the talk
that I still have to have
with friends and colleagues
in the in the world of Eastern
Greek and Eastern Orthodox.
- There is a question similar questions
on Catholic modernity.
Into which extent the Agg
is precisely something
that is very much linked
to this notion of the Catholic modernity.
And the other question about
aspiring Catholic theologian
who has studied the history
of Western philosophy
and post-modernism,
increasing the strength
within the church.
I have found it ought to be wanting
it is safe to say that
the Catholic modernity
will be an authentic response to the call
for aggiornaménto from Pope John 23rd.
What I mean is a comparison or metanoia,
where we returned to the
sources in such a way
that there's not prima facie
reject the modern world
nor blindly accepts past views of reality.
- I subscribe to that,
that's very convincing.
I mean, I think that what goes
along with the aggiornaménto
is another attitude towards the past,
where it doesn't become simply normative
but where are you see in the past
an immense possible
repository of spiritualty
that we can can nourish us today
if we connect up to them in our own way,
and I think that's going on all the time
that people are, you know,
rediscovering the importance
of (speaking in a foreign language)
rediscovering the importance of
the Desert Fathers and so on.
And seeing that is very much related to
their particular path as
growing in the Christian faith.
So it's not a matter of we either follow
slavishly the past, or
we totally reject it.
On the contrary, we have to hold
aggiornaménto of the Vatican Two
was we have to think of what's
appropriate in our time.
But in working out what's
appropriate in our time,
we can find resources, right to
the whole history of the church
and right across across the
whole geography of the church
and then think of how someone like myself
have been tremendously helped
and fed by a certain dimension of
lets go again to talk about
Eastern Orthodox theology
that crept through to me and had been
very meaningful to me
even though they're not
part of my immediate
background as a Catholic.
- And then we have a
question from David Lemon,
Prominent Sociologists of Religion
from Cambridge University
work in Latin America
and Israel his question is,
we are the finding that
the authority of experts,
judges bureaucracy is quite fragile.
Is this because religion
is not providing the glue,
if it ever did but rather has
in many places become a
force for polarization
precisely at a time when
political participation
has been spreading and intensifying
as advocated by Citizenship Theory?
- Well, I think that religion
is not a single thing
it's split.
I think we are virtually all confessions
are split between very often as this is
the kind of split between
people who really want
to return to a past of
much greater conformity
and greater unanimity around
church, mosque, whatever
Oma et cetera.
And people who find this new world
in which there's a plurality of searchers
in which the searchers are interested
in a kind of a e-communism of
exchange with each other right?
So there's an opening their horizons,
I think we find these two reactions,
and they're, they break
rather hostile to each other.
So there isn't a single
phenomenon called religion
operative here, there
is a different kinds of
faith different kinds of ways
of entering into faith, which have
tremendously different consequences.
I would say that the one
that I was writing about,
but the one that I also feel I belong to
the world of searchers is, of course,
much more open and much
more favorable to the idea
of a re-diverse society of mutual respect.
Whereas we find that in many cases,
the more reactive kind
of circling the wagons
religiosity is supporting
the reason why they turn back
to various kinds of populism,
even to certain Catholics in the states
voting for Donald Trump
(laughs) on that basis.
- There's a question for Salma Rodriguez,
who is a PhD candidate
at Columbia University
and she writes deeply diverse
democracies like India
have negotiated the dilemmas
with an Indian form of secularism.
But in the process, Islamic justifications
for post-colonial democracy,
or other similar minority
justificatory discourses
have had to constantly encounter
Hindutva majoritarianism.
Can rejecting mythological nationalism
be one way of dealing with this dilemmas?
- Well, no, I think
again, we're dealing with
one of these fights
between different notions
of the national identity.
And there was a few
like Gandhi narrow idea
of the Indian national identity,
which we meant to include
all the different faiths
and for a long time it was dominant.
I mean, what is really worrying is that
you go back to the
1960s, the kind of thing
represented by the present
ruling party, the BJP
was represented by the Hindu Maha Sabha
which was a tiny group, it was a virtually
no members of parliament.
And it's since grown.
So the issue is always in all these cases,
not nationalists, like
not national identity,
but to the two very different versions
of the national identity, fighting it out.
And what I find very worrying
and I don't have the explanation to it
is why in the present constellation,
what I consider the bad
side of national identity
is winning out everywhere.
See, I mean, there are
individual explanations
in all these countries, but
why is it all happening now?
Is there any kind of common
cause or common factor here?
- We have a question from Iban Garthone
from let me look for the question.
From Colombia, who is asking,
what do you think of the fact that
during the COVID-19 pandemic,
in many Western countries,
people can go to a church
to pray even alone?
Is this some kind of secularism
imposed by public authorities
and the protest of public health?
As you know, this has
been a controversial issue
about maintaining churches
open or not gathering churches.
So what do you think of his controversies?
What is valid of the critique?
What is not valid?
- Well, I don't think
it's a valid critique
that for instance, you know,
there are no more Friday mosque prayers
and the no more people
getting together for mass.
It's is something that is
obviously very dangerous
for you if spreading could be a dangerous
locus of spreading the the virus
opening churches where
people can go as individuals
to pray is another matter
and that's happening
in a lot of countries, right?
Provided people keep social
social distance from each other.
But I think that it's not in any way
I got a secularist blog or a secular ploy
to close churches and it's something
that a great many churches
and religious communities
have quite freely accepted
as being something necessary.
- Then we have two
questions which are similar
political theory.
One comes from me, name
Blaisdon, Jason Blakely,
a Professor of Political
Theory at Pepperdine.
And he writes, you seem to affirm aspects
of the liberal tradition,
especially pluralism.
Yet many of the new socialist
millennials in the USA
think of themselves as post-liberals.
How do you conceive of
the relationship between
your social democratic
commitments and liberalism?
In what sense are you a liberal?
Should we be liberals or post-liberals?
- Well, I think that liberal
is one of these words
that has so many different meanings,
that you can't take a
stance towards liberalism
without specifying it.
So let me specify, I
think there is a kind of
liberalism could be called that
which I'm calling pluralism,
the acceptance of
difference and the belief
that a difference enriches
us and not impoverishes us
and that we should be open,
and we should exchange.
And then there's a kind of
thing that which you can call
maybe neoliberalism, which is a quite
unjustified faith in markets,
not only to maximize production
but also to make sure
that everybody benefits
from the results of production benefits
from well.
That has been an immense
illusion, which somehow,
people I hire can force it on the world,
together with the political movements
on Reagan and Thatcher and so on.
And I think we see the
utter refutation of that
in the present crisis
that we just have not
prepared ourselves.
We starved various public services,
we have increased radically
increased inequality,
we have increased the
plight of deprivation,
which we thought we had
no obligation to relieve.
And this is more the
case in the United States
than anywhere else in the Western world.
And so if that is if
neoliberalism is liberalism,
(laughs)
I'm totally against it, and I think
this is what the young
millennials are saying
in the United States
today, who are part of the,
you know, the big Democratic
victory in the Midterms
and I hope will be part of the
Democratic victory in next November.
But they're thinking of that as liberalism
but it's a terrible confusion
to think that all these different things
openness, willingness to exchange sense of
enrichment by difference.
And Reagan Thatcher or US Republicans are
part of the same world, the same idea.
It's just the single word which
unites those different views.
- Then we asked a question from a student
of political theory is a Ukrainian
doing his PhD at Leuven University,
Victor Poletco who writes,
"in your work some political secularism,
"you often expressed
an optimistic attitude
"as to the prospects of reaching
an overlapping consensus
"and a set of central liberal notions
"in the sense that they get support
"from diverse intellectual traditions
" despite some opposing
metaphysical claims
"of those intellectual traditions.
"Do you remain optimistic on that?"
- Yes, I am.
I mean, I do because
I realized is a danger
because as we see, various people turn
their version of the national identity
into something which is seen
to be absolutely essential
to living that national identity
and they then not only wanna win out
but they wanna make
their gains irreversible.
So they end up destroying democracy,
but there can be this kind of
unity of citizens across difference.
So I would say my notion
of democracy and liberalism
can be summed up by going
back to the original
French Republican Trinity.
(speaking in foreign language)
Liberty, Equality, I
would replace fraternity
with a gender neutral term of solidarity,
I think if your notion of democracy
doesn't include a very
powerful sense of solidarity
between all citizens, then you have
a very inadequate democracy,
which is heading for one of these
terrible populists deviations.
So I think that if we include solidarity
in our picture of what democracy requires,
then we have a really adequate view.
And we can we can be in
solidarity with people
that are not exactly carbon
copies of our outlook.
We're asked to the every time
we open our frontiers
to refugees from very,
very different cultures,
and we're asked to do that
whenever we unite together with citizens
of very different cultures,
different origins,
and share with them in order to make sure
that everybody has a decent life.
- Very good.
And then Gloria Moran
is scholar of Canon Law,
would like to ask you about
the role of mediation,
in particular religious mediation
in the narratives of
consensus and democracy.
- Oh, well, I think yeah, mediation
I can see I think I can see
what the question is getting at.
Mediation is very important
because one of the things
we find one of the real,
you know, diseases we find in our society
is that people are seem to
be more and more convinced
that they understand what
other people are about.
And this is what gets intensified
in one of these populace
situations because they,
populace appeals demonize the elite
so it's clear that they
are simply interested
in themselves and not sense
of the good of the people
in heart and on the other side,
you get these same
elites who are dismissing
populace voters as ignoramuses,
as deplorables and so on.
What we really need much
more in our societies
is a attempt to understand
what is motivating people, including
what's motivating people to do things
that we totally disapprove of.
I mean, this is something that I've been
very engaged in in
Quebec because we've had
a fight about certain legislations
which have been discriminatory
against Muslims for instance.
But if you dig into the reasons for this,
you find a very complex set of reasons
not all of which are bad.
And one has to have that
kind of attempt to understand
what makes the opponent tick.
What the deeper motivations are,
'cause a lot of them are perfectly good,
perfectly acceptable and it's that
which is missing in our
societies and unfortunately,
not just missing it's being
driven to the margins.
The kind of polarizations we now live in,
encourage people to
caricature and misunderstand
their opponents to the point where
the possibility of finding
some kind of common ground,
I would say the possibility
in very many cases
of converting the other side
to one's own side, disappear completely.
- In the same vein, Marco Ferrario ask,
the need of recognition
how is it connected
with the crush of democracy you mentioned?
Would you like to add something
about the need for recognition
in the importance of this concept?
- Yeah, well, I think that the
(speakers speaking at the same time)
Yeah, I think the recognition is precisely
the opposite of this kind of alienation
I'm talking about where we have
a completely caricatural view of the other
so that the sense that the other has,
he or she has is that when faced with us,
they're faced with some kind of stereotype
being plucked on them and
what they really are like,
is totally unrecognized.
The kinds of mediation I was talking about
can lead to this sense
of mutual recognition,
a sense of yeah, I get you
I don't fully agree with
what you're driving at
but I sort of get where
you're at as a human being.
And it's that kind of mutual understanding
that can help to dissolve
some of these deep, deep divisions.
So I think that recognition
is still absolutely one
of the really important
issues in our society.
- I will ask you for a
brief personal question
asked by Brooke Valve in a Duke.
Take it into the final reflections
in any direction you want.
So she asks, what inspired
you to study religion?
- Very big question.
Well, I mean--
- You have four minutes to answer it.
(laughs)
- Ill be faster than that.
I break the question down into two,
what inspired me to begin to think about
the Christian Catholic faith.
And that's really very
simple, that I was brought up
in this extremely narrow
authoritarian in church.
(laughs)
And I couldn't, I just couldn't see
the point in any of this and I,
but I had several questions
and so I wanted to ask myself,
how to articulate it.
And then the next part of the question is
how I got interested in
something beyond my faith.
And that's because I had the great luck
to have a magnificent
teacher as an undergraduate
Wilfred Cantwell Smith
who later became famous
as a student of Islam set
up the Islamic Institute.
And he gave a course on
comparative religion,
which is absolutely
riveting in which he made
these different faiths
comprehensible to us
young undergraduates in the
1950s, 40s and 50s, in Montreal,
and I was carried away by that.
I've never come back from
that kind of interest
in economism and understanding the other.
- Well, on this great
note, I want to thank you,
Charles, very much for your openness
to have this conversation with all of us.
I would like to again,
thank you all of you
for participating and for your interest.
As I mentioned, this is
the first in our series
we already can confirm it will appear
it will be eventually
appear in our website,
but we know that the next conversation
is going to be on July 9th.
Is it July 9 Thursday?
I believe so, let me make
sure that they got it right.
Yes and July 9th, the
prominent sociologist
German sociologist Hans Joas
will be the next conversationalist.
Hans Joas is actually the
one who brought us together
as three together,
Charles Taylor, me and him
to be together for one year at the
Brandenburgische in Berlin.
And this is where basically Charles Taylor
wrote his manuscript, A Secular Race
conversation with many of us.
There was a larger group and since then,
Hans Joas really, really written
very significant works on
the sociology of religion.
Two new books are coming out.
"The Power of the Sacred"
and the new book is writing
on religion freedom.
And we'll be discussing those issues.
I can say it's an anecdote the three of us
three Catholics in a very
secular Protestant city Berlin
a few times we appear
together in forum discussions,
and we began to be known as
the Three Catholic Tenors.
Charles, would you like
to add something to that?
- No, I didn't know that. (laughs)
- You didn't know that?
- Or I forgot my memory
suppressed me. (laughs)
(mumbles) no, not a base
or something like that.
- Well, and these note again,
thank you very much to everybody.
Thank you, especially Charles, stay safe
and we are looking forward in a few years
to celebrate your 90 years anniversary.
I still remember the big
celebration we're in Montreal
the fantastic conference and your work,
both as a philosopher as an intellectual
as a politician in Canada,
and we are looking forward to again,
celebrate your 90th
anniversary in a few years.
So keep safe, stay healthy, and keep us
illuminating us on the
complexity of the human condition
as you've done through many decades.
We are still looking
for many important books
from you as they are
coming in your mature age.
Thank you so much.
