Towards a Postsecular Society

[Conclusion]

With these seven contexts I am suggesting that the postsecular is emerging from the secular in a patchy way, with elements contributing to it that run at different speeds and over different timeframes, and that they include science, art, and postmodernism. But what of the relationship between the presecular and the postsecular, that is between the religions of old and the emerging spiritualities? We have to observe that parts of this even larger picture run with still greater variation of speed, there being entire sectors of contemporary society that are untouched by modernity and postmodernity, let alone the postsecular. There are estimated for example to be 70 million Christian fundamentalists in the US today. The presecular survives in great swathes into the secular world, but the fact is that it contributes very little to popular or highbrowculture . We might say that religion flies below the cultural radar of the West, largely due to the intellectuals of the West having poured their energies into less problematic projects, such as science and politics. It is also rather shocking that Eastern ideas have been known in the West since the mid-18th century, but, with the exception of Schopenhauer, they have been ignored by almost all important thinkers, whether modern or postmodern. The presecular religions of the West have therefore been largely insulated both from modern and postmodern thought, and from exposure to the East. Yet religion up to the 17th century - and Eastern religion prior to its contact with the West - has historically shown itself to be remarkably adaptable and even an engine for progress and change. By contrast, in the secular world of the 20th century it has been ghettoised and insulated from the crucibles of change that have forged the contemporary worldview, making the adherence to it almost as embarrassing today as frankness in sexual matters was in the Victorian era. The result is that presecular religion may not be able to make the transition to a postsecular world, rather that entirely new forms of spirituality may emerge, perhaps the most promising arising out of deep ecology / nature mysticism.

But the postsecular lays a potential trap for new spiritualities as they emerge, and we can anticipate this from the seven contexts suggested above. Each one extracts a price for allowing its practitioners the new freedom to engage with the spiritual. These include the scientisation, the psychologising, the philosophisation, the theologising and the ecologising of the spiritual, in other words a dynamic that requires the spiritual to be interpreted by each discipline, to be given a language from each discipline. It is science of course that poses the greatest danger, and hence my article “Against Scientific Magisterial Imperialism” mentioned above. However the psychologising of the spiritual is just as big an obstacle to recovering a genuinely spiritual language and a genuinely spiritual sense of self, indeed the ‘self’ is almost entirely understood today in psychological terms. (It was not always so.) Not that science and psychology do not have a great deal to contribute to the new spiritualities, far from it, and not that imperialisms of one kind or another are not being questioned: the logical positivism of the last century is for example less of an influence today. But the spiritual needs to assert its own language again, independent of the past, and independent of science and psychology, and even for that matter, philosophy. Possibly the simplest way to do this is to make sure that the postsecular impulse does not draw on one of the seven contexts alone, but cross-references each one of them. Art - by which I mean all the creative fields, including poetry - is a great corrective to science, and the creative fields, where they have explored the spiritual impulse in the 20th century, yield many insights. For example the series of paintings by Mark Rothko, the American Abstract Expressionist, which were hung for many years in the ‘Rothko room’ at the Tate Gallery in London, point to a non-verbal language of the spiritual which invoked spiritual insights for generations of gallery visitors.

With these points in mind I have set up a Centre for Postsecular Studies at London Metropolitan University. Its focus will be to support research, including Doctoral studies, from a range of disciplines in such a way as to foster an open enquiry into the spiritual. It is fitting that a University should be the setting for this. In the Middle Ages Universities supported the intellectual efforts of religious Scholasticism, in the Modern period Universities defended the secular freedom to question authority, and in a postsecular spirit, perhaps the University setting can restore the creativity and vigour of intellect to spiritual questions. The key to the work of the centre will be interdisciplinarity, which is always a challenge to traditional subject divisions. Yet the very word ‘university’ originated from a perception that a universality of mind was required to study any specialism, for unless one knew the topology and boundaries of other disciplines and the nature of the intercourse within and across them, one could not claim to have a rounded university education, or any proper insight into the world. I have suggested that the postsecular emerges from the seven contexts listed above, but these are not exhaustive and only a guide. Debate and research in postsecular studies will undoubtedly take many new turns and draw from unexpected sources. However, it will be characterised by a respect for what I have called ‘epistemological pluralism.’ We are seeing this broader respect for different forms of ‘knowledging’ in Universities in the example of the relatively new practice-based Doctorate in Fine Art. This allows art practitioners to submit a body of work which encapsulates their research, and is examined, usually in conjunction with a written contextualisation, by experts who can ‘read’ the artwork as well as the dissertation. This would have been unheard of 20 years ago when positivism held sway within University research degree committees.

But, looking somewhat into the future, what shape might a postsecular society take? In essence it will celebrate a spirituality that has emerged out of the confrontation with the scientific worldview, and as such it will owe much to it. While the intensely secular nature of the 20th century has involved the very real loss of provision for a fundamental need of the human spirit - a need expressed in the etymology of the word religion ‘to re-bind or re-connect’ - it has provided humanity with a profound recognition of the worth of the individual. The spirituality of the postsecular era cannot but reflect this in a ‘bottom-up’ spirituality, forms of communal spiritual practices that listen rather than preach. More important still is the ecological imperative, a possible doomsday clock set ticking by technology, anticipated by science, and only resolvable by a science harnessed through a spiritual sense of union with nature and the planet. This is an ecology that goes beyond utilitarian survival or obligations of stewardship, but which instead makes nature a site for a profound spiritual love. This is an ecology that can succeed. Of course a futurology is to be avoided, in particular a futurology of the spiritual, but one cannot help asking also whether culture might change. The fact is that, barring the Sunday ‘godslot,’ and ‘televangelism’ - that is TV channels paid for by religious organisations and found mainly in the USA - the cultural outpourings of the west through TV, cinema, journals, newspapers, novels and other media, portray an intensely secular worldview. Portrayals of the spiritual are either through worn-out and faintly embarrassed stereotypes of the presecular religions, or they fall into the X-Files category: a culturally permissible indulgence in the spooky or occult, also found in a range of science-fiction genres. Where is the cultural excitement provoked by the discovery in 1945 of the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi excavation, comparable to the interest taken in the human genome project? Christianity, immune to the power of intellectual curiosity driving the rest of the world, dismissed it as heretical, while the secular world was not even tempted to read it. Only in the recent film ‘Stigmata’ (starring Patricia Arquette and Gabriel Byrne) did a phrase from Thomas turn up as a central and sobering theme in an otherwise rather melodramatic invention. Still, maybe the film is a harbinger of more thoughtful treatments of spiritual issues marking the shift towards a postsecular culture.

The Network could be involved in the work of the new Centre in several ways. It could participate in the general discussion around the concept of the postsecular, and, more practically, members could put themselves forward as potential Doctoral supervisors. My aim, within the Centre for Postsecular Studies, is to form a kind of clearing house for interdisciplinary research in this field, by providing a register of suitable and willing supervisors. I would also be delighted to hear from any members interested in undertaking doctoral studies themselves. I anticipate that many applicants will be mature practitioners in their field, possibly already holding higher or research degrees, or even amongst the so-called ‘third age.’ After all, in the spiritual life, is this not the time when one grows closer to the eternal?

In conclusion I want to consider how the Doctorate in Postsecular Studies might take shape and serve the Network. The Doctorate has traditionally provided a period of reflection and study, structured in such a way as to cement a community of thought through the twin tracks of consolidation and innovation. Consolidation means that the doctoral candidate makes an assessment of the field in both a broad sense, which may rather skim the surface, and in a deeper sense where it homes in on the research questions being posed. Innovation means that a substantial and original contribution to the field is made. The doctorate also implies an intellectual or creativerigour . While intending no criticism of Network members, I would guess that many of us have at times read articles or heard presentations where we felt that this rigour was somewhat lacking, but might not necessarily be able to pin down why. I suspect that while our training in science or medicine has given us the instinct for rigour, our cultural lack of exposure to rigorous discourse around the spiritual has created the context where it often goes out of the window. In other words aspiritual literacy is needed, a point I argued at one of the Network’s annual gatherings some years ago. Hence my vision for this programme of doctoral studies would include breadth, drawing on the seven contexts outlined above, rigour, as we have learned through science (though not degenerating into a scientism), and a spiritual literacy.

Of central importance to the Network is the relationship between science and religion, and this provides many potential topics for doctoral research. In a postsecular society one of the most pressing questions would be to re-examine the assumptions made about the origins of modern science and thought in the seventeenth century. All the scientists of that time were deeply religious individuals, who could not possibly have anticipated or relished the idea that science would be held up in later centuries as contradictory to their spiritual impulses. Even Pierre-Simon Laplace, famous for his remark to Napoleon about God: "I have no need of that hypothesis," is now known to have been a genuine Catholic all his life, requesting not one but two priests to administer his last rites. (Atheists of the less thoughtful variety still seize on Laplace’s remark as a vindication of their secular views.) A postsecular examination of the three great ‘rationalist’ philosophers of the period, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, also reveal not just deeply religious men, but spiritual geniuses whose spiritual thought has never been examined or allowed to take its rightful place in the spiritual life of the West. (Poor Descartes in particular needs rehabilitation having been long and unfairly vilified as the author of the mind-body ‘split.’) It is as though we still believe that priests are the only ones allowed to contribute to religion, whereas it is clear that great scientific minds are very often great spiritual minds.

It is with that last thought that I approach the Network regarding these ideas concerning a possible postsecular society.