Something Happened To Us Yesterday

{An addendum of sorts to my previous comments on HOW (NOT) TO BE SECULAR}

"It is said that Chou En Lai, asked to assess the impact of the French Revolution, replied: 'It's too soon to tell.'" ¹

In reading James K.A. Smith’s HOW (NOT) TO BE SECULAR, one particular thought kept occurring to me: “modernity” (or “secular modernity”) hasn’t been around very long—maybe we shouldn’t rush to judgment?

The pre-modern worldview that Smith and Charles Taylor contrast to modernity—the “enchanted” worldview, the “religious” worldview, the worldview that took for granted God (of some sort), divine purpose, and mankind’s being embedded in an objectively meaningful cosmos—has been around, in one form or another, roughly forever: as long, that is, as humans have been creatures capable of forming a worldview.  More specifically, Christianity has been with us for 2000 years, and its Judaic ancestry goes back another thousand years or more before that. What we call “Christendom,” the unchallenged reign of Christianity over Western Europe, held sway for over a thousand years before the Reformation fractured it and the Enlightenment elbowed it aside.  And even in our supposedly secular times, Christianity endures (albeit no longer unchallenged); moreover, Christian apologists are the first to claim that much of our "secular" modern landscape—everything from art to music to literature to politics—has been formed (and informed) by Christian concepts.

Consider, then, that what we call "modernity" is no more than three hundred years old at most.  Charles Taylor’s A SECULAR AGE very explicitly makes the case that a secular worldview—disenchanted, rejecting teleology and objective meanings, and with God banished to the margins (if there was even room for God at all)—was literally not even thinkable until around the 18^th century. So if secularism hasn’t brought us yet to the Promised Land, should we really be surprised?  Two thousand years of Christianity hasn’t gotten us there, either; maybe we need to be a bit more patient with modernity.

Which isn’t to say that we’ll ever reach any utopian Promised Land at all: it’s only to say that our progress towards it, or lack thereof, shouldn’t be so hastily judged.  And when Smith and Taylor make much of a continuing sense of loss that they say haunts our secular society, might we not remind them that it will inevitably take time to leave behind traces of the enchanted world in which mankind existed for so long?  Memories fade, as do dreams, but not necessarily overnight; and in historical terms, modernity happened to us just yesterday.  While I have much sympathy for the Smith/Taylor defense of the older worldview, I also have the nagging suspicion that it’s much too soon to declare the new one a failure: let’s give modernity another five hundred years or so before we decide to write it off.

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¹ From Peter Household: http://peterhousehold.blogspot.com/2011/07/chou-en-lai-on-french-revolution-did-he.html

As Peter Household acknowledges, this quotation has been repeatedly disputed and thoroughly debunked.  A book could (and should) be written about its misuse and misattribution.  The fact remains that it’s a damn good line, and I’m using it here even though I’m aware that it’s entirely inaccurate; so sue me.