What Comes After a Secular Age?

With progress, the realm of the possible slowly retreats. A medieval Chinese peasant would never have imagined a cell phone, a refrigerator, an automobile, but they did imagine vast Buddha realms which last for trillions of years in magical abundance and Bodhisattvas possessed of far greater powers than modern technology. Disenchantment, the slow loss of everything supernatural, has increased our appreciation for this world, but it is still a loss.

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is a wide ranging account of how the North Atlantic world (America and Western Europe) became “secular,” which is in turn the origin story for what has been happening to the rest of the world The book makes many arguments worth dwelling on extensively, but one particularly related to this loss concerns “fullness.” Fullness is a term for the constellation of conditions which most religions of the world posit as the final, fully realized state of a human being. This is most recognizable as heaven, a divine realm without fault and full of eternal joy common to the Abrahamic religions and certain forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, but can extend to any completed state such as the resurrection body or various forms of nirvana. Fullness is the absolute purpose of human life and in most religions can be only be reached through the aid of the supernatural whether God or Buddha.

We have lost belief in the possibility of fullness. We accept the premise of our more religious forebears that any sort of state beyond time, death, or suffering can only be achieved by the supernatural, but we do not believe in the reality of the supernatural. Thus in an age of progress we believe that we are progressing towards ultimate human good and ultimate human happiness, but this ultimate is nothing special. The end of human existence is not fullness, because fullness is impossible.

The secular, liberal idea of ultimate human good is significantly more modest. The highest human potential is one where material scarcity is not an issue, relationships with friends and family are good, sometimes even great, one has time and energy to pursue their own interests, and the bounded human lifespan is about 100 years. If an American becomes an artist and scientist, achieves renown in their field, has vacations with their children, meditates every morning and runs an occasional marathon, advances justice and kindness where they can, and dies peacefully at 105 they have achieved quite close to the absolute limit of human potential. Even an imagined radical socialist world looks identical, the same material reality with a little more communal solidarity. A utopian society would be one where everyone on earth can achieve the same and tailor their choices and states - art or science? religious or non-religious? big family or no family? - according to their own preferences.

Why have our ambitions become so modest? The standard account of secularization is that the loss of the supernatural is a facing up to reality. Science requires belief in a well-ordered cosmos absent of any personal will, and the ethics of improving life-as-it-is requires that one not believe in other forms of life. Religion added on extraneous and imaginary concerns for millennia, and now thanks to science and liberal ethics we are returned to our original purpose - improving our single life and desiring no more beyond that. Now we must be adults, facing up to reality of eternal death and limitation, not distracted by the imaginary comforts of our childish ancestors.

These are common arguments, but they are wrong. The shift to secularity and the bracketing of all supernatural as beyond possibility are not necessary consequences or requirements of advanced civilization. They are highly contingent aspects of Western Europe’s moral transformation. The European wars of religion, the Protestant Reformation, and the elite civility of the Enlightenment all led to a view of the cosmos focused on the tolerant individual distrustful of Catholic superstition. Taylor’s historical arguments for this are deep and not easily summarized, but as long as one accepts that secularism’s bracketing on human life is contingent, moral consequences abound.

What if fullness is possible? What if the ultimate liberal ambition is only a small fraction of true human potential? It may be that the supernatural is real, but it may also be that nature is far more expansive than we like to think it is. Technological progress has given us refrigerators and automobiles in short time, but what if it eventually gives us radically extended lifespans, deeper ways to experience pleasure through neurological interventions, or incredibly enhanced knowledge of the universe and its inhabitants. It may be impossible to become the God of a monotheistic religion, but a minor God, angel, or Bodhisattva might very well be within reach. Humanity thought these were real for millennia, why have we been so quick to accept their logic impossibility?

Secularism as a moral position, often masquerading as a scientific one, has been putting up defenses against this for centuries. Popular media likes to defend the finite lifespan through argument and platitude - children read Tuck Everlasting to learn that even if immortality was possible, it would not worth taking, and Dumbledore assures Harry Potter that death is a part of life that magic should not interfere with. In the many impossible and fantastic worlds that have become popular - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, etc - all people and characters have our lifespan, our same potential for happiness, our same bounds for human relationships. We cannot imagine a world without the same interpersonal deceit and suffering that pervades our own.

Writers and commentators have gradually been transforming religion into a handmaiden of the liberal project - Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism are all acceptable beliefs if they enhance your personal enjoyment of your own life, but to think beyond that is zealotry. Buddhist Nirvana, once a fullness that could only be reached after countless lifetimes of karmic merit and meditation, has been reinterpreted to be a freedom from stress and acceptance of the present material reality.

This may not hold. Odd researchers are starting to discuss bioengineering immortality, resurrection, artificially intelligent god-beings and more. If we make these, surely our morals and background understanding will change, and human life will be radically transformed. But under the current understanding we resist these. These are not our top concerns despite their potential, and instead we prefer small incremental improvements to existing medical care or infrastructure, bringing us closer to everyone getting to have a house and 100 years. These pursuits are not mutually exclusive, and morally we should be investing in both, but there is much greater public suspicion of the radical path than the safer one.

The world ahead is strange and scary. If our mortality is not necessary, but contingent, it becomes harder to accept. We like to think that the cosmos is devoid of all care for humanity, but also that every individual can at least reach their maximum potential, and this consolation may be false. Common moral axioms such as discrete individuals and the primacy of human life over animal may very well fade with radical advances in biology and neuroscience. The future may not be recognizable to we who have the responsibility to build it.

But we must. If we truly believe in humanity, in advancing towards our perhaps infinite potential, we must not be constrained by our own consolatory desire to be near the end of history. We must be willing to admit that we too are children compared to our descendants. We must move beyond the static contentment of a secular age, and go forward to the fullness beyond.