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Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and Professor Emeritus at McGill University. Taylor is the recipient of both the Kyoto and Templeton prizes, and is the author of major works including A Secular Age and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. His most recent book is Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Taylor discuss how the modern notion of identity differs from that of the past; the role of religion and religious belonging in today’s societies; and the “post-liberal” critiques of liberalism, including the claim that it’s impossible to be truly religious or devout in a liberal democracy.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Much of your work is about questions of identity, democracy and diversity, questions about who we are, how that shapes our lives and its meaning, and what that means for the kind of institutions that we should adopt.
What does the concept of identity actually mean? And how is it that we think about our own identities in very different ways to how we might have done one or five hundred years ago?
Charles Taylor: A very, very interesting question, because it's kind of crept in unobserved. When people talk about “my identity” or “his identity” today, what they very often are doing is spelling out the most fundamental benchmarks by which they live their lives, so that when they're trying to make a very difficult decision, or articulate what their values are, they reach towards that. It might be a religious faith, it might be belonging to some nationality, it might be a whole host of things, but we could have asked somebody about that in, let's say, 1940 and we wouldn't have used the word identity, we would say, “What are the really important fundamental things that allow you to make decisions in life?”
Erik Erikson has his very interesting books on identity. But I think what happened was that the idea grew very powerful, coming from the Romantics, that everybody has their own identity. That it's different from person to person, and also that somehow we have a very important role in defining what it is. And that change is what accounts for the shift from asking people about what's fundamentally important to you to asking people about their identity. So it's a kind of an introduction of a certain element of self-interpretation into this which goes along with the idea that there are fundamentally different identities, and that no two people have exactly the same identity. It’s a very Romantic-type idea, that everybody is different. Everybody has their own fundamental view on life.
Mounk: That's very interesting. When I was at university, a lot of my classmates had done gap years in places like India to find themselves. And I always thought “What made you think that you lost yourself in India, such that you can go to India to recover yourself there?” But it seems to speak a little bit to this kind of notion of identity that is both individual, that you have to construct, but it's also somehow already inherently there in the world to be discovered.
What does that concept of identity get right? What of it should we retain and what aspect of it do you view critically?
Taylor: Well, I think it's right for us. I mean, there are these big, big differences that occur in history. Erik Erikson, I don't know if you know his work. He wrote a book on Luther called Young Man Luther, and he interpreted it very interestingly, as Luther is trying to discover his identity, going through agony before finally, yes, it's only salvation by faith and so on. And that's very interesting, because there was something really, totally anachronistic about that. If you'd gone to Luther in 1517, and said, “poor Martin, you've suffered from an identity crisis, but I'm glad you're feeling better,” I don't know, he might have slapped you in the jaw. It would have been inconceivable, because there are no differences of personal identity. The really important things are this or that—salvation by faith, or salvation by works.
Human culture changes. People change in history, and we now live in an age—in the West, anyway, but it may spread—in which people conceive of the fundamental issues in a key in which there's an individuality here, and you have to discover it. You have to find out what's really important for you. So I think that in one way, we’ve always been doing this. But now it's against the background of, in a certain sense, having to be original, having to be different, having to be something special. This is just our culture today.
Mounk: How does this concept of individual identity correspond to the role that groups and communities play in our society? The modern and, in some sense, the liberal notion of individualism has often been criticized for somehow being at odds with the importance of social links and social networks. But if anything, the rise of the Internet and of social media seems oddly to have valorized identity and particularly group identity, rather than dissolved it, as we might have expected thirty or so years ago.
So how is it that this Romantic notion of the individual, that has to both be found and constructed, then coexist with what seems to be not just the very substantial importance of groups and communities in contemporary life, but in some ways, perhaps even a growing importance of groups?
Taylor: I think that for a lot of people, going back to the fundamental question here, which straddles the historical gap (“what's really important for you?”)—for a lot of people, that is their belonging to this religion, this nationality, and so on. That doesn't cancel this modern individual twist, because you could say that anyone could say to me that being, let's say Canadian, means something different to the person down the street who's also got the same passport. And if somebody turns around and says “All Canadians out,” or “Canadians are inferior,” or whatever I am, I sense that the core of my being is being dissed, or disrespected, right? I think there's no contradiction between the idea of, “I put a certain spin on this, but it is the belonging to this group that really is important to me.”
Mounk: It seems to me that there may be a little bit of a contradiction in the way that people talk about it, though perhaps not at the deepest philosophical level. But there is at least a tension, let's say, between a culture in which what it is to be an individual is to go find yourself, to construct yourself, and some of the culture that I see many of my students nowadays come from, where, from elementary school to high school, they were often encouraged to think: “My identity is the particular intersection of group identities I stand in. The way to find myself is not to go to India and perhaps do some drugs and have a spiritual experience that's often orientalized in weird ways. It's to go to the affinity group of, say, Asian American students at this high school; it is to define myself by my sexual orientation or by other kinds of ways in which I slot into a landscape of pre-existing group identities.”
I get that these two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they do seem to stand in tension in the way that people tend to think about how to construct their sense of self.
Taylor: No, because, for one thing, the idea today that just because I was born an X doesn't mean that being an X is really important to me—it may be something else, right? This could be put in the terms of the notion of ratification. I am, like it or not, a Canadian; like it or not, a male of a certain age and so on. And then, how do I react when people say that Canadians or males of this age are something very despicable? Well, it could be that, although I am one, that it's not really vitally important to me, so I say so. But if it's the case that I'm really deeply identified with this, if I've ratified that, then I feel deeply, deeply insulted. And I think there's a certain amount of people, in a way, looking around for ways in which some feature of themselves is being depreciated and devalued, and then, as it were, turning their lives around and making that the cause of fighting against that. I think there's a certain amount of that going on in our society because there’s something a bit noble about being a persecuted minority and therefore you want to valorize it. But the element of ratification, as I'm calling it, is always there.
Mounk: Let me change gears a little bit and ask you about the strain of your work that is very important, and that I, as a person who's quite secular, who wasn't raised in a religious tradition, sometimes have more trouble accessing. And that's your work about religion and secularism.
The title of one of your most influential works, A Secular Age, sounds straightforward. When listeners to this podcast will hear that title, they can say, “Well, of course. Church attendance is down and religion plays a smaller role in people's lives.” We might be picturing responses to Pew surveys and so on. But what you mean by a secular age is a little bit different, I think, from what people might imagine—it contains, as I understand it, the claim that even people who are quite religious today, even people who do go to Mass regularly or who pray five times a day, are secular in a way that would have been hard to imagine a few centuries ago. So what beyond the statistics about church attendance, or beyond what percentage of Americans or Canadians or Germans might say that they believe in God, what makes this age a secular one?
Taylor: One very important thing is that religion is no longer at the center of the identity of states, whereas, if you look a couple of centuries before, even less than that, in Europe, that hasn't been the case at all. In Germany, many states of the Holy Roman Empire were Calvinists, and others were Lutheran and others were Catholic, and that was the way it was, and there are very few that managed to balance a number of different religions. Now it's the norm that the state is not aligned with any religion. So that's one very, very powerful feature of secularity. But in the book, I said that there's another one, which is that the our whole set of understandings about religion have shifted, and what's become really important to lots of people is a spiritual search, finding some kind of meaning, some of which would could involve some elements of of religious faith and so on. The practice of religion has continued, but it’s really changed. And it's been changed in an interesting and sometimes very trying way: between people who very strongly want to hang on to their religious identity as it was conceived before, and people who are approaching that religious identity as searchers, there has arisen great mutual misunderstanding and even hostility. For some, being Catholic involves no change at all in the particular ethical questions, total belief in infallibility and so on, and they double down. And they double down precisely because people of the other tendency are challenging that, right? So we're living in an age in which religious belongings are polarized, and it's very interesting and disturbing. It's also true in Islam. And it's also the case that the possibility of religious war has not been put aside at all. On the contrary, there's people who belong to this integral bloc who would be glad to enter into conflict with others. This is visible in the Islamic world, that the more, as it were, Salafist one is, the more one is ready to go out there and fight—fight against your own minority, fight against Europeans and so on. So it's a very complex situation, very unfortunate in many respects, but it's that kind of alignment, as opposed to the old days. That's why I use the word secular age. It's an age in which the whole positions of religion and non-religion and so on are fundamentally altered. There was decline, sure, but also new forms. And I wanted to try to describe what actually happened.
It's certainly the case if you remain fixated on the total members of churches, you have to ignore the whole development of very diffuse and very, very diverse expressions of spirituality that are here. If you want to describe the scene as it is, the kind of choices people have, the way that they relate to these choices, and move in and out of them and so on, you have a very moving picture. What will come later? I don't know, I'm sure. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will surprise us (if we live long enough to see what happens next).
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Mounk: One of the criticisms that's often made of philosophical liberalism specifically, but the basic principles and institutions underlining contemporary liberal democracies more broadly, is that they're somehow inimical to certain substantive philosophical views, and particularly to religious ones. You hear this critique formulated nowadays in the form of often devoutly Catholic post-liberals on the right within places like the United States, where they claim that the supposed neutrality of liberal institutions actually systematically undermines the ability of traditional communities, of religious communities, to persist, and favors a form of radical self-experimentation that is inimical to those communities. One post-liberal that I interviewed on the podcast claimed that liberalism is really the maximization of autonomy, and as such, is irreconcilable with religious communities. You also, of course, see that claim made in a sense, for example, by Salafists. There's a form of Islamism which claims that it is impossible to follow the commands of Allah in the right way in a society that is corrupted by Western morals.
I'm skeptical of that critique, as somebody who's a philosophical liberal, but I wonder whether part of your description of what it used to be like to live in a deeply religious community can help us understand and excavate it, which is to say that you didn't have to be religious as a choice—it was such an eminent feature of all of social life that it was quite different in nature from your understanding of religion in the secular age.
How much credence do you give to the complaints of these various forms of post-liberals who say that our institutions appear open to them, and claim to be neutral in a way that accommodates them, but actually are not?
Taylor: I think those claims are not always, but very often, in bad faith. People who are integralists have a desire to lash out. I understand it, but it's very unfortunate. So they have a desire to find cases where they're being coerced. And particularly in the United States, you get these, I think, in the end, kind of crazy cases of somebody who's asked to to make a cake for a wedding between two gays and so on—even if they're forced to make the cake, it's hardly a grievous denial of their ability to practice their religion, particularly when the religion concerned is supposed to make people exercise charity in relation to each other.
Particularly in the United States, these are the kind of people with a chip on their shoulder that are just waiting to find an excuse to lash out. And of course, they have the First Amendment on their side, because the First Amendment has a clause against the establishment of any religion, but also against the restriction of the free exercise of religion. That’s there. It's very interesting that these cases are almost always free exercise cases. But in a lot of cases, they're picking a fight. They're picking a fight to make a point.
It's just a fact of the modern world that there is this diversity, and that diversity prevents, or relegates to the past, the totally unreflecting belief that this or that religion is the right religion. The thing is, I lived through the transition. I'm old enough. I was brought up in Quebec before the Second World War. I wasn't very old, but I remember the kind of totally clerical society that we had in French Canada, which was very much embedded in my family. So I know what the atmosphere was like in those days, and I know the kind of benefits from this of certain political leaders who presented themselves as ultra-Catholic, and their way of doing that was to be hard on religious minorities in order to get votes. And it is terrible irony for me today you see that the same kind of politics is being carried on in the name of what's called laïcité in Quebec.
So why am I giving you this bit of autobiography? Because I want you to understand that I really understand what was wrong with the previous situation in which everybody was X, Y or Z and had to be X, Y or Z. I lived it. I didn't suffer myself. And we were a family that was very, very multi-religious, and no one persecuted anyone. But I looked out from this safe haven and saw what was going on in the society. And I'm just irrécupérable for that kind of society.
Mounk: One of the obvious ironies of particularly the Catholic form of post-liberalism that is put forward by some people in the United States is just how radically out of keeping it is with any realistic idea of how American society works. I mean, it's always tempting to think, when you consider free speech, for example, that censorship would be just fine if I were to be the censor, and I get to decide what can be said and what can't be said. But this is sort of an extreme form of this, in which people who engage in a minoritarian interpretation of a minoritarian religious denomination within the country somehow think that the answer to all the ills of our present political condition is to overthrow liberalism, and then imagine that somehow they would end up being in charge. And I think there's a good reason for those of us who don't follow this particular set of religious ideas or practices to fear that kind of society. But it's also just deeply naive for them to think that that is what would happen.
Let me tease out another difference that is interesting to me, which is related, obviously, and it's the difference between the United States and Canada on the conception of free speech. In the United States, the First Amendment protects a far reaching notion of free speech, which makes it basically impossible for the state ever to punish or imprison people for things that they say, certainly when it is a matter of political expression. In Canada, as well as many European democracies, you've had the introduction of quite far reaching hate speech laws over the course of the last years and decades. According to a new piece of legislation that is pending in the Canadian Parliament, the Online Harms Act, there could be prison sentences of up to five years for various forms of hate speech, and possible life imprisonment for anything that is considered incitement to genocide. How do you feel about these two different political traditions? Is there virtue in the more absolutist defense of free speech in the United States? Or do you think that there can be a justification from within liberal or communitarian grounds for the kind of hate speech legislation that many other democracies have adopted in the last years?
Taylor: Exactly where you draw the line is very, very difficult. And I understand the dilemmas one has drawing the exact line, that there are these two considerations which are very important, freedom of speech on the one hand, and the possibility of speech being used to arouse hatred and even encourage harm to other citizens, that need to be taken into account. I have no doubt that you can't simply say one of these, as it were, decides every issue, but drawing the line is tremendously difficult. That I certainly agree with.
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Mounk: I guess the argument that defenders of free speech would make, and I count myself among them, is to say that precisely because drawing the line is so hard, we shouldn't be in the business of drawing that line. Which is to say that, in reality, this just becomes such an exercise of political power that it is simply going to enshrine the views of the dominant majority over everybody else. We're assuming that the people who are going to be in charge are always going to be on the side of progress and enlightenment and diversity and so on, but certainly at a moment in which some less than tolerant political forces are doing very well in opinion polls and having a lot of power in parliaments across the Western world and beyond, it is simply naive to think that the people who are going to be charged with drawing those lines are somehow going to be on the side of the vulnerable and marginalized. By definition, they're going to be quite powerful, right? Because they need to have the power to be in those positions, and sometimes they may happen to be tolerant, but often they won't.
So what would you respond to somebody who's defending a more absolutist American conception of free speech that says the only way you can actually ensure that people are able to speak their minds is to not be in the business of drawing those lines?
Taylor: Well, if you don't recognize that there are two considerations, then you're just blinding yourself to reality. And you may say that if there is such a thing as restricting speech, powerful people will overdo it—very possible, very possible. But, I mean, this is just one of those very important lines you have to draw with great care. You can say that sometimes welfare, if it's overdeveloped, can give money and help to people who should be able to help themselves. This is what the Republicans are always saying in the United States. But there are really important human needs here that have to be met. I'm a Social Democrat, I draw the line very differently from American Republicans. But I think we all have to recognize that there is a line here to be drawn, and we can't just escape from it by saying there's no other consideration. This is a kind of political reasoning which is very common in the United States, which I find absurdly uninteresting to follow.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Charles discuss how he has managed to stay deeply engaged with intellectual ideas into his 90s; his brief career in Canadian politics (including a run against Pierre Trudeau); and why we should still read Hegel. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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