A Secular Age

That's the title of a book I have just bought in the last few days. I like to keep an eye on the book reviews in various publications, and this book kind of called out to me from a couple of mentions, much as "The God Delusion" did. It's good to get a bit of illumination on the things going around my head, whether I ultimately agree with what I read or not.

This tome, by a Canadian philosopher, is not what I would call a brilliant piece of writing. The style, while chatty at the sentence level, is complex and academic in structure, and I find I have to keep a concept in mind over several pages of preparatory digression before a point becomes clear. However, the ideas are the essence, not the style, and they are well worth the effort.

The overall subject is the retreat of religion from the Western sphere of thought, and why it happened, and what we have both gained and lost in the process, and what it means to have religious faith in the context of that retreat. I hadn't intended to start the book just yet, but having checked out the introduction and first chapter, I have already met with some useful concepts for the change in my own life.

The first is that in some circumstances (if not most), actual belief is less significant than behaviour. If an assumption that one believes in something guides one's actions, then the question of whether that belief is really present may never be confronted. That means that only rare people dissent from the default beliefs of the society they're in, because it needs a positive step to do so. In medieval times (and also now among the brethren) the defaults were different to what they are for most of us now, and that makes the state of mind then hard for modern people to take in.

Another is the idea of "background", in the sense that there are some things in any system of thought that remain unquestioned. If the background is different between two people or two societies, then real understanding is very difficult.

And the most useful idea just at the moment is that everybody's lives have three components: a sense of occasional complete fulfillment, a total absence of that feeling, which produces despair, and a general middle ground in which one is aware of the possibility of both extremes but is grounded in daily life and is the usual state of being. In times past, that fulfilled sensation was associated with religion, but it is key to modern thought that there are other alternatives, and complete satisfaction may be found by other means as well as by religious experience. The important thought to me, though, was that it is impossible to function successfully as a human being without some grasp of such transcendence over daily life - that is, unless you have the feeling deep down that complete happiness is possible, and know roughly what form it would take, your life will tend towards that despairing absence.

That's where I'm at. My life became intolerable among the brethren because I became aware that what the brethren held out as an ultimate goal wasn't something I could accept as complete happiness. When that's the case, daily life is no longer acceptable. Now my woolly ideas of personal nirvana are gaining gradual solidity, and I become more grounded as they do.

As for the book, I recommend it - if only to people with good capacity for thick complicated books. Anyone wanting to grasp the brethren's mindset could do worse than to read it, mentally substituting the brethren for the pre-modern societies he discusses. There are amazing parallels.