4 Moralism and Its Traps

It is an honor to respond to the work of Charles Taylor, one of the leading philosophers of our day and someone from whom all of us have learned. In doing so, I face a problem: I basically agree with Taylor’s argument. I think his central point is right. We in the contemporary West are living with a flattened, even deadening, conception of human life. What is more, there are important, yet untapped, theological resources to respond to this situation. What I propose to do in this essay is to reconstruct the method and content of Taylor’s argument. He has some important things to say and anyone interested in theological reflection should seriously consider them. Having done so, I will then isolate some “traps of moralism” that keep one from responding theologically to the political situation. Taylor’s argument helps us partly escape those traps, but the theologian has more work to do in order to ensure that robust religious discourse can be heard amid the din of political debate.

As I read Taylor’s argument, it is a complex defense of a basic thesis. The defense of this thesis is given through an insightful excavation of the modern moral order.[1] Taylor’s contention is that we find ourselves in a cultural and political situation in which it is hard if not impossible to rise above consequentialist calculations and rigid ideas of reciprocity in the attempt to overcome legacies of human conflict or even conflicts between goods. In other words, we are in a situation in which what counts as a “valid” and persuasive moral or political argument is one that supposedly “works” by making things better. Further, what counts as “better” is determined on non-moral grounds so that all “goods” can be made roughly equivalent and also what protects people’s rights can be measured. This also means that we have to make people better so that they will work to make things better in the way so defined.

This is the backbone of code fetishism, as Taylor calls it. Moderns imagine that a code will settle moral disputes based on ideas about the commensuration of goods, personal rights, set procedures, and also a certain kind of moral formation so that we will live with these ideals. Code fetishism is one hallmark of the modern world, Taylor holds. It is a kind of secular redemption rooted in a rather one-dimensional view of human beings and moral situations. But the fact is that our moral situation is more complicated than that, just as people are varied in their needs, outlooks, and capacities. Moral reasoning must therefore be more subtle than modern ethics imagines.

The reasons for the present condition are complex and to understand them one must explore the moral order of contemporary life.[2] Several points are crucial to this analysis and they structure much of Taylor’s argument. Current Western societies, on his account, are driven by a moral outlook that focuses on submitting all human life to codes of conduct aimed at “improving human beings.” This enterprise cannot meet the actual dilemmas of existence even as it can warrant aggressive policies of restructuring life. The code fetishism, as Taylor calls it, is interrelated with other elements in the current moral order, namely, an utterly inner-worldly understanding of human life. There is, in other words, a reduction of life and moral perception to purely historical relations. Given this, we lack the epistemic and affective resources to rise above the mundane and to reorient commitments.

Code fetishism and inner-worldly humanism, along with its Nietzschean and other critics, rests on a still deeper element in the current moral order, namely, the loss of a vibrant sense of religious transcendence that does provide perspective and motive to address and overcome seemingly intractable social and political problems, especially those about violence and war. A religious perspective, Taylor contends, can address the differences among people and goodness needed to advance the cause of justice.

An interesting contrast can be drawn here better to grasp the force of Taylor’s account. Ernst Troeltsch, one of the most compelling early twentieth-century theologians to engage social analysis, argued, like Taylor, that the modern world is defined by an immanentalism, a virtual deification of the actual. In this situation, what count as valid moral norms are those that mitigate the struggle of existence and develop distinctly worldly, secular goods. Immanentalism is, moreover, an attack on the human impulse to absolute values and norms, like those found in the Christian tradition. In other words, Troeltsch did not see a conflict between absolute values and religious claims; in fact, Christianity just is about the absolute value of life in relation to God’s reign.

The task of theological ethics, accordingly, is to seek some mediating position between the demands for secular goods needed in life and the absolute vision of love found in the Gospel. In this way, there is a mutual transformation or accommodation: the secular order is always tested and transformed under the pressure of absolute values even as Christian thought and discourse must be revised in order to make it comprehensible for this age. For Troeltsch the problem is not that human life will be transformed under some conception of what is better. That is what always goes on in culture, the work of meaning-making and the forming of human lives. The problem is what account of “better” ought to orient our actions of transformation, the work of culture.[3] For Taylor the problem is about a specific kind of human transformation, or so it seems.

The deep roots of the modern moral order are located by Taylor in reform movements within Christianity. This is a surprising argument. I imagine that by isolating the roots of code fetishism within Christianity, Taylor hopes to move Christians beyond that account of their faith and back to something closer to the radical claims of the Gospel. Yet as far as I know, the point of Christian faith, especially among Protestants, has always been that human beings cannot utterly transform or save themselves. That would be works-righteousness. Even Troelstch with his concern for social and individual transformation insisted on this point. It is why the Reformers rejected Medieval Catholicism with all its monastic orders and ideas about condign and congruent merit. The magisterial reformers like Luther and Calvin and others much later, such as John Wesley, insisted that God, not human codes or human actions, redeems human beings. That is probably the difference between the secular and the Protestant reformations.[4] In this sense, the Protestants were just being biblical. After all, the bible has things like the Decalogue and the Holiness Code in Leviticus and also Jesus’ Torah teaching in the so-called Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). This is hardly code fetishism! It is about liberation, emancipation, and freedom. In this respect, the roots of modern code fetishism ought to be sought in monastic movements and medieval penitential rights rather than among the Reformers who proclaimed God’s free grace accepted in faith. The story told in Taylor’s lecture clearly needs some further historical nuance.

What does all of this have to do with the place of religious claims in public life, the topic of this conference? Taylor’s claim, if I understand him rightly, is that the contribution religion can make to political life is crucial. Religious resources, through ideas like “forgiveness” and “sanctification,” provide epistemic and motivational distance needed to overcome conflict. Anyone mindful of the history of modern ethical thinking, from Kant onward, knows that one profound weakness in that tradition is its inability to deal with human evil and moral change.

This has led some thinkers back to virtue theory in ethics. It has led others to claim that the whole problem of moral change is simply outside the ambit of ethics and politics. It has also led to social engineering, code fetishism, or longing for the Übermensch. Taylor’s insight is to see that the problem of moral change cannot be outside of politics and ethics and that most of our available sources for thinking about moral change are not up to the task. That is why we need religious discourse in the midst of public debate.

This is an impressive argument. It is a subtle analysis of our situation, one that joins cause with wider movements in postmodern thought and anti-theory in ethics that see something deeply wrong with those thinkers, like Kant, who struggled for freedom and sought to validate moral rules and laws without appeal to a wider conception of the human good. It is an argument that aids the cause of theologians and religious thinkers, especially since we are all too aware of the reasons for the exclusion of religious claims in public life. Again, despite some question about historical accounting, this is an argument I heartily endorse.

That said, I turn from analysis to assessment. I do so in the spirit of common concern and the hope of provoking further discussion. We can isolate three “traps” that continually threaten thinking about the place of religious claims in public discourse. Part of the problem in the modern age is that theologians have fallen into all three traps simultaneously and thereby have marginalized their discourse in political matters. Taylor’s argument helps us out of these traps. However, in order to see this we have to push those arguments a bit further than Taylor has done in this lecture. This task is, admittedly, the theologian’s or religious thinker’s job; it is not one required of a philosopher.

A striking thing about Taylor’s argument is that he seems to have completely dodged the usual trap of debates about “religion and the public order,” what we can call the “validity trap.” This is a trap wherein no argument is admissible to public debate unless it first shows itself to be committed to an ostensibly neutral method of validating argument. Think here of Mill or Dewey or more recently Habermas. But, of course, most religious believers cannot, and maybe should not, grant that proviso. So, it seems that whenever we talk religion we are necessarily talking privately and not publicly because religious claims cannot meet the demands of public validation.

Now there are many ways to escape this trap, and Taylor does so in an important way. Like many before him, Taylor knows that whoever tells the story, whoever describes the situation, defines the terms of debate.[5] If one adopts Taylor’s story of modernity and its code fetishism, then, he has gone a long way in making his case. He has made an error-reducing move in our self-understanding. So, if religion is part of that story, then it is, per definition, admissible to public discussion. Religion was part of the debate all along and to ignore this is to suffer misunderstanding the current moral order of life.

The story Taylor tells seems attractive enough to religious folks. But as I have already noted, it needs some additions. The insight of the Protestant Reformers was that code fetishism was a departure from the message of Christ. Grace is a gift, not an achievement. What is more, this theological insight carries political consequence; it requires a separation of powers. The state cannot control the religious life; the religious life impacts political institutions indirectly. Ideas like freedom of conscience, political equality, and liberty have some of their roots here. To be sure, the political order must run by law, but it cannot and must not claim to remake, to redeem, human beings.

From this perspective, the tale that must be told is how much modern tyranny is the attempt to surmount that separation and make the political order a redemptive force, say, in state fascism or some forms of communism. The idea that we must remake life does have deep roots, but it is one closer to Machiavelli and his love of Roman Civil Religion or virtue theory and even some penitential practices than to the Protestant reformers and their ideas about distinct “kingdoms.” This Protestant argument remains a permanent possibility for political life even if it has not always been lived out. The insight is that the separation of powers is a boon for religious faith. It insists on the activity of God without demeaning the responsibility of human beings.

Taylor’s history requires on the part of a theological ethicist more nuance about the various kinds of reforms found in Western history. Without attention to these differences we risk forgetting some things, like the dominance of penitential practices in pre-Reformation Europe or the horrors of religious wars driven by the confusion of Church and State. What is needed is a history of freedom wherein freedom is not unmoored from a wider horizon. Taylor is right about part of the story. Yet we also need an idea of freedom that is thoroughly human. We only escape the validity trap if the story we tell articulates the religious presence in the current moral order, as Taylor does, but also the profound insight of theological resources for the specification of political and religious differentiation. In this way one shows why religious discourse is politically resonant and yet also why believers ought to join open debate about the validity of their distinctly political claims. I think the argument of Taylor’s lecture should be pushed in this direction. And this brings me to the next “trap.”

Thankfully, Taylor wants to situate human life in a wider horizon than often found in modern secular cultures. The argument made by a host of contemporary neohumanists, like Tzvetan Todorov or Martha Nussbaum, about a purely inner-worldly or lateral transcendence simply does not strike deep enough.[6] So, Taylor speaks of the “horizontal” and the “vertical.” These ideas, along with some general notion of “transcendence,” serve as the conceptual framework for understanding the contribution of religion to public discourse within the story he tells. They do so in a way that does not confuse or radically separate these orders. To be sure lots of people talk about religion in these rather stark terms of the horizontal and the vertical. These ideas function as “place holders” for a whole constellation of vivid concepts and symbols in the biblical traditions. That being said, it is important to remind ourselves that ideas like “vertical” and “horizontal” quickly become ossified forms that stop thinking rather than articulate genuine religious insights.[7] This is a warning to theologians rather than to Taylor.

So, again, the theological ethicist must be careful. First, we should note that one of the crucial strategies of modern critics of religion is to insist on abstraction from complex, symbolic forms of thought and discourse thereby to reduce that discourse to a more neutral form. Religious discourse must be reduced to conceptual form (Hegel) or shown to be really about hidden psychological problems (Nietzsche, Freud) or be seen as an expression of alienated species nature (Feuerbach, Marx). In making these moves, religious claims are banished from public discourse either because they lack cognitive content (what is the meaning of the “vertical?”) or they conceal vicious motives. And, oddly enough, theologians impoverished themselves by consent to these moves when the complexity of religious ideas, symbols, and narrative are translated into abstract ciphers like “vertical” and “horizontal.”

Abstractions like the “horizontal” and the “vertical” and “transcendence” do not help theologians as much as one might think. For the theologian, they are actually a trap. If one looks at the biblical creation narratives, Pentecost and the pouring of the Spirit, prophetic discourse, or claims about table fellowship around Christ, it is clear that how the divine interacts with reality is exceedingly complex! This symbolic and conceptual complexity should not be lost by applying a twofold grid of horizontal/vertical or any other schema of sheer abstraction. In a word, theologians need to stick to their texts and show the social, cultural, and political relevance of complex accounts of the divine activity. Theologically, one must show the hermeneutical import of religious symbols, metaphors, and narrative without too quickly translating them into abstract concepts. This is all the more the case if we want to escape the first validity trap. If one must forgo all the complexity of religious discourse in order to speak in the public arena, then one wonders what one is speaking about. Either we think religious discourse is truth seeking and realistic or we do not. One must critically correlate forms of thought and discourse and not simply reduce one to the other.[8]

There is a second reason why we should avoid this language of vertical and horizontal. In my judgment, Taylor has identified a central problem facing all societies, namely, how to achieve cognitive distance and also abiding commitment to overcome legacies of conflict and the conflict of human goods. He uses the language of “transcendence” and “verticality” and “regeneration” to speak about this possibility. Taylor intimates that this is the real insight of Jesus and his parables insofar as those parables recast the whole meaning of justice. There is real insight here. It is why Christian thinkers have never been happy with conceptions of justice that leave out ideas about righteousness or mercy or forgiveness. Taylor is right about all of that and also how ideas of transcendence are seen in some of the great movements of our age, like Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa.

The problem is that we impoverish our religious discourse if we think it is just about transcending the horizontal, giving us a new perspective on political life. That would require a theologian to assert that somehow Christian or Jewish or Islamic faith makes no conceptual and cognitive contribution to the meaning of basic political ideas. Faith just gives us a new perspective. Is the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Prophetic words of Micah or the radical act of Jesus’ table fellowship just about a new perspective on life? Taylor has shown us how religious ideas help decode the modern moral order. If that is so, then let us put them to positive work freed from the slim ideas like the horizontal and vertical. The hard task of escaping the “abstraction trap” is to show the insights and power of operative religious symbols, texts, and conceptualities.

So, Taylor’s argument, as I understand it, helps the religious thinker begin to escape two traps that have been used to keep religious discourse from the public arena, ones adopted even by theologians and ethicists, leading to the self-marginalization of religious insight. But that is not all. When the validity trap and the abstraction trap are linked, as they are in modern Western secular cultures, they lead to a third trap, what we can call the identity trap.

If one can only enter the public realm validly by abstracting all content from one’s claim while hoping that some religiosity still remains, what then becomes of actual vibrant religious communities? Two options seem possible. First, these communities atrophy and eventually are assimilated into the wider culture and society. What remains is a hint, memory, or trace of previous ideas and values. Troeltsch called this the “mystical-type” of religiosity. People live with a vague sense of “spirituality” important for their individual identities but are unable to join any real religious community.[9] Second, communities retreat into themselves and seek to foster their own identities over against the rest of the culture. Here is where code fetishism really rules because so much energy is spent on shaping a community and its distinctive vision of life.

Taylor is aware of this as well. He clearly sees the problem of the loss of a vibrant religious life, but he is also, although somewhat less pointedly, aware that we do not want to retreat into religious enclaves and attack “modernity.” Not only must we deploy a robust discourse and so avoid the abstraction trap as well as tell a history that breaks out of the validity trap, we also need to clarify just what religious identity means.

On this point, I think that believers must affirm what they share with others who struggle against hatred and violence. It is not too much to say that we need common humane, even humanistic, commitments. Religious believers come to those commitments with a rich vision of human existence in all its despair and all its joy within the complexity of God’s dealing with the world. In this way one remains firmly rooted in a home tradition and yet is not captive, one escapes the identity trap. One is, say, a Christian or a Jewish or an Islamic humanist.[10] This is hardly code fetishism. It opens just the kind of compassionate understanding that Taylor wants. Hopefully it avoids the traps that have structured the modern debate about the place of religious claims in public discourse. This might help provide a way beyond legacies of conflict without the illusion that our forms of understanding can ever redeem humanity.

Professor Taylor has given us an insightful analysis of the modern condition. We are, I believe, fellow travelers, mindful of the gains of the modern world but also seeking to reclaim the moral and political vibrancy and depth of our religious heritage. I hope that I have not only understood him rightly, and but also that I have isolated those places where, for theological reasons, we might and must extend the argument, make friendly amendments. A vision of human existence that pictures us cast into a vacant universe charged with the endless task of making meaning is finally a celebration of power that is also profoundly hopeless. Religious traditions, as Taylor insists, have symbolic and conceptual resources needed to articulate a different account of existence at once realistic and yet ennobling. The task before us is to begin to explain just what that means for our public life.

NOTES

1. Taylor has addressed some of these issues elsewhere. See his Variety of Religion Today: William James Revised (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

3. See Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon with foreword by James Luther Adams, 2 vols. The Library of Theological Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992).

4. Of course, there is a long line of sociological inquiry, beginning with Max Weber, which reads the Protestants, with their inner-worldly asceticism, as the virtual originators of the modern world. Taylor seems to agree with this reading. But there is, one must admit, a good deal of counter-evidence that requires a more complex account than that given by Weber and others.

5. This is, of course, the gambit of Taylor’s book, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

6. See Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) and Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a different position see William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004).

7. The point here is that we do have criteria for theological discourse; we are not lacking in standards. These have been developed over centuries through hard intellectual labor. These have to do with valid concepts for the divine, the logic of predication, the use and interpretation of religious texts, and the like. One public task of the theologian is to insist on these standards in assessing religious discourse in a culture.

8. For the classical account of the method of correlation, see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 3 Volumes (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

9. Taylor has explored some of this problem in The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

10. See David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) and William Schweiker, Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).