Taylor - The malaise of modernity

The Massey Lectures Series

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

This book comprises the 1991 Massey Lectures, "The Malaise of Modernity," broadcast in November 1991 as part of CBC Radio's Ideas series. The producer of the series was David Cayley; the executive producer was Bernie Lucht.

Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor is an award-winning philosopher, academic, writer, and critic of modernity. He is a Rhodes Scholar, former Chicele Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University, and Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. In 1992 Taylor was awarded the Prix Lon-Gerin in the category of social sciences for the Prix du Quebec the highest honour given for contributions to Quebec intellectual society by the provincial government. In 2000 he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. Professor Taylor is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy, a Companion of the Order of Canada, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His books include Hegel, Philosophical Papers, The Politics of Recognition, Modern Social Imaginaries, and the seminal Sources of the Self, which established Taylor as one of modern philosophy's leading thinkers.

CHARLES TAYLOR

Copyright 1991 Charles Taylor and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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First published in 1991 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Taylor, Charles, 1931
The malaise of modernity

(CBC Massey lectures series; 1991)
ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-520-8
ISBN-10: 0-88784-520-7

1. Self (Philosophy). 2. Civilization, Modern.
3. Philosophy, Modern. 4. Ethics.
I. Title. II. Series

BD450T38 1992 126 C91-095689-8

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Typesetting: Tony Gordon Ltd.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Printed and bound in Canada

My thanks go to Connie and Frank Moore for their help in discussing the project, and to Ruth Abbey and Wanda Taylor for their close reading of the manuscript. I am grateful to Eusebia da Silva for her help in defining this, and the larger project to which it belongs.

I want to write here about some of the malaises of modernity. I mean by this features of our contemporary culture and society that people experience as a loss or a decline, even as our civilization develops. Sometimes people feel that some important decline has occurred during the last years or decades since the Second World War, or the 1950s, for instance. And sometimes the loss is felt over a much longer historical period: the whole modern era from the seventeenth century is frequently seen as the time frame of decline. Yet although the time scale can vary greatly, there is certain convergence on the themes of decline. They are often variations around a few central melodies. I want to pick out two such central themes here, and then throw in a third that largely derives from these two. These three by no means exhaust the topic, but they do get at a great deal of what troubles and perplexes us about modern society.

The worries I will be talking about are very familiar. No one needs to be reminded of them; they are discussed, bemoaned, challenged, and argued against all the time in all sorts of media. That sounds like a reason not to talk about them further. But I believe that this great familiarity hides bewilderment, that we dont really understand these changes that worry us, that the usual run of debate about them in fact misrepresents them and thus makes us misconceive what we can do about them. The changes defining modernity are both well-known and very perplexing, and that is why its worth talking still more about them.

(1) The first source of worry is individualism. Of course, individualism also names what many people consider the finest achievement of modern civilization. We live in a world where people have a right to choose for themselves their own pattern of life, to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, to determine the shape of their lives in a whole host of ways that their ancestors couldnt control. And these rights are generally defended by our legal systems. In principle, people are no longer sacrificed to the demands of supposedly sacred orders that transcend them.

Very few people want to go back on this achievement. Indeed, many think that it is still incomplete, that economic arrangements, or patterns of family life, or traditional notions of hierarchy still restrict too much our freedom to be ourselves. But many of us are also ambivalent. Modern freedom was won by our breaking loose from older moral horizons. People used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, a great chain of Being, in which humans figured in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures. This hierarchical order in the universe was reflected in the hierarchies of human society. People were often locked into a given place, a role and station that was properly theirs and from which it was almost unthinkable to deviate. Modern freedom came about through the discrediting of such orders.

But at the same time as they restricted us, these orders gave meaning to the world and to the activities of social life. The things that surround us were not just potential raw materials or instruments for our projects, but they had the significance given them by their place in the chain of being. The eagle was not just another bird, but the king of a whole domain of animal life. By the same token, the rituals and norms of society had more than merely instrumental significance. The discrediting of these orders has been called the disenchantment of the world. With it, things lost some of their magic.

A vigorous debate has been going on for a couple of centuries as to whether this was an unambiguously good thing. But this is not what I want to focus on here. I want to look rather at what some have seen to be the consequences for human life and meaning.