David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. We are in our last week of Monday through Friday Coffee and Wisdom. Starting for our summer season, we will be going to live on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But there’s lots of content available on the Din of Conversation YouTube channel. So definitely check that out. But yeah, we will be trimming things back for the summer starting next week. On so, Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week. This week we’ve been looking at the common task, looking at the idea of secularity and the civil responsibility which many religious people have argued can’t be done in a secular society. So we have been kind of considering how we might do that going forward. One of the central thinkers in the idea of what secularism means in the 20th and into the 21st century is Charles Taylor. His book, “A Secular Age” is considered by many to be the book about this. It came out in 2006. In that one, he says, the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer and meaning and less concerned with others or society. This is kind of the common way that the idea of secularity and individualism is being dealt with these days. But Charles Taylor is quite the thinker and he has made this a little bit more complex than merely saying that secular people are all individualists.

So I take a little bit of a deeper look into some of what he has to say today. And he has himself said that his philosophical project, the main thing that he wants to talk about, is he wants to develop a convincing philosophical anthropology. What is a human being like in our secular world? It’s not as easy as it looks at first. He does claim and I have a suspicion that he’s probably right. One thing he says is the Enlightenment conception of the individual is based in assumptions of hierarchy. That so to treat people with dignity and respect, we need to take full account of their varied social situations. He says, you know, we have to think back on this Enlightenment idea of the worth of the individual. The individual meant a very different thing in those days. So we need to think about that. He sets up this conversation in a book called “Sources of the Self.” It’s an expensive book to acquire. It didn’t come out as a huge press run, but it is available at many libraries. So the Enlightenment conception that one of the individual is based on conceptions of the hierarchy. He has some other ideas about the Enlightenment and areas that it pushes us into, to make mistakes as well, one being language. In the Enlightenment period there was the printing press and there was the spoken word and that was about it. Well, that’s not how language works nowadays.

And also, Taylor talks a little bit about what the concept of the soul was about, coming out of the Protestant Reformation into the Enlightenment period and how we consider the soul nowadays. Yes, some religious people still talk in terms of the soul. And, yes, we even use it in popular parlance. But the idea of the soul, as it once was, is no longer how we think of the authentic self or the authentic individual. And this affects the way we approach the socialization of human beings. We have so many options, he says, that we are perpetual seekers nowadays, and that that is one of the reasons for what we call identity politics, the rise of identity politics. So this can produce extreme individualism, says Taylor. And it can be politically divisive, but it can also serve to call us to our better selv...