The Modern Malaise

I recently spoke with a group of Christian scholars concerning Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007). This particular conversation involved an analysis of what Taylor calls "the malaises of modernity." Briefly, summarizing Taylor, the malaises of modernity involve the following:

1) The sense of the fragility of meaning and the search for an over-arching significance (those moments we no longer feel our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others).

2) The felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives (for example birth, marriage, death- previously solemnized by linking with the transcendent-holy-sacred, but now many people use the rites without feeling any connection with religion, eg. marriage in a church).

3) The utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary (in the repeated cycle of desire and fulfillment in the consumer culture, "the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb; the ugliness of slag heaps, or an aging industrial townscape").

For Taylor these malaises are ones of immanence, the loss of the transcendent (of the Other outside of ourselves, i.e. God). What I found interesting about our discussion was how the group took it for granted that what Taylor was discussing was indeed a universal Western condition. This simply is the way things are. A suspicion steadily arose in my mind: is this not an entirely post-Christian sentiment? I cannot begin to count the many times I've heard Christians tell me that "without God life would be meaningless." I too have experienced a great sense of the "fragility of meaning," of no longer being able to justify my beliefs to others or myself. This was of course when I "lost my faith". It took several years before I was able to recover from this (and I might add, without help, support, or understanding from almost anyone- there is a great need for qualified and understanding workers in loss-of-faith contexts). The point here is, however, that in order to experience this "malaise", this loss of feeling/living towards the transcendent, one must have something to lose in the first place. Yes for the post-Christian this loss and subsequent sense of flattening may indeed be experienced (though of course it is not inevitable), but when I reflected on acquaintances who were raised in non-faith homes or who had never believed in a transcendent Other in the first place, I came to the conclusion that perhaps there has been a mis-diagnosis here, that many people live without displaying any of the three symptoms above. Perhaps it is because they are unreflective! Yes perhaps.. many people certainly do not reflect on the bigger questions. Regardless, it simply isn't true that the "modern malaise" afflicts everyone in the West, or perhaps even that it afflicts the majority of people.

How convenient it is to think so if one is a Christian. "People are lost and adrift without God: therefore, we, the Church, have an important answer for them- inoculation against meaninglessness." [In my mind I see a more sinister (hopefully fictional) Christian character discussing his plan with his underlings: "If the malaise of modernity didn't exist, we would have to invent one. In other words: In order to justify our continuing belief in this myth we must first invent a problem for which we alone have the solution."] The malaise Taylor speaks of here is the post-Christian malaise of the loss of meaning. It is, afterall, in modernity that Christian faith has taken a number of blows from various sources (perhaps ultimately from itself: I am totally in agreement with Taylor here). It is, therefore, (and I wouldn't extend this too far beyond it), a Christian illness, rather than a societal one per se.