A three-way fight

I spent some very profitable time last week discussing the work of Charles Taylor with people who are much more qualified to speak about him than I am.  For those who don't know, Taylor is primarily famous for his enormous book A Secular Age, in which he tries to answer one question: how have we moved from a point in 1500 when atheism was more or less inconceivable, to a point in 2000 where belief in God is enormously contested?  What changed in society and the intellectual world of the West to make atheism a live option, not just for isolated individuals, but for the mainstream of Western people?  The book is exhaustive, and exhausting, in its run through the history of the Western world in search of the answer(s) to this question - if you haven't read it and want a way in I'd strongly recommend James Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular as a good introduction and guide before you dive in.

One particular part of Taylor's analysis struck me as having renewed importance in our current cultural moment.  Taylor suggests that there are not two great forces in our culture - the religious and the irreligious, say - but three: "There are secular humanists, there are neo-Nietzscheans, and there are those who acknowledge some good beyond life." (636)  By 'secular humanists', Taylor means those who restrict meaning purely to the 'immanent frame' - i.e., nothing transcendent, nothing spiritual that exists above and beyond our human conceptualism of the world - and yet remain optimistic about the power of humanity to shape its own existence to benign ends, and are invested in the project of human improvement.  Broadly, this would align politically with secular progressives.  Then there are the religious, or at least those who look beyond the world as we see it for meaning and direction; they are typically also progressive in some sense, in that they believe in the capacity for things to get better, even if the end goal of that 'better' is not found within the horizons of this world.  They will, of course, debate with the secular humanists as to what 'good' means, but they agree that there is good and that it is worth pursuing.

The third group Taylor calls 'neo-Nietzscheans', or "the immanent counter-Enlightenment". (636)  This group denies the progressive tendency in both other camps; there is no 'good' per se which can be pursued, and humanity as such is not reformable.  All we can do is harness the evil tendencies of humanity to something which will benefit the species.  Various species of political Darwinism belong here, and we might point to particular figures who represent this tendency - Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, and to an extent Donald Trump spring to mind.

Taylor's point is that this is a genuine three-way fight.  The secular humanists and the neo-Nietzscheans are agreed, against the religious, that there is no transcendent source of meaning or ethics, and that decisions have to be made purely on the basis of what we can see around us.  But on the other hand the religious often find themselves agreeing with the secular humanists when it comes to pursuing some good intention within the world.  (We might suggest that this is particularly the case in the contemporary West, where the supposedly neutral and universal values which secular humanism considers itself to be pursuing are heavily inflected with historic Christian thought).

But there is a third alliance which often pops up, for "neo-Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension." (637)  Both the immanent counter-Enlightenment and the religious see secular humanism as in a sense naive, and doomed to fail on its own terms.  They both want, for very different reasons, to shake the liberal consensus just to demonstrate that it is without foundation.

At the moment, I think the neo-Nietzscheans are on the march, and secular progressivism is in retreat across the West.  And I think we, by which I mean 'acknowledgers of transcendence' and specifically Christians, need to be careful.  Let's not rejoice too much at the woes of secular humanism.  Let's take care not to line up with the neo-Nietzscheans and think that we can turn our momentary agreement into a lasting alliance.  In the end, there is a lot in secular humanism with which we are in profound agreement; indeed, I would argue that there is a lot in secular humanism that actually belongs to us.  And I think that the forces of the immanent counter-Enlightenment will be very happy to turn their guns on us at the first opportunity.